Thanks for correcting my false assumption. I do recall reading articles about engineers telling management it wasn’t fit for release. 

To the bolded, that would be incorrect.  The app was beta tested by users, and Sonos released it anyway.  Reports are that both beta testers and developers stated the app was not fit for release (the quote is developers were “yelling and screaming” in meetings), but they were overridden by management. 

For me.. I tend not to use playlists at all; I search an artist, album or song and play that. I use search all the time, and it’s annoying that it’s kind of hidden away.

Things played fast (meaning near-instant, not ~1.8 seconds) in the old app and don’t in the new one. That’s rather unfortunate, was entirely predictable when Sonos decided to take this approach, yet they did anyway, without sufficient testing (only testing with Sonos staff internally, as I understand it). I actually tried to use my old S1 app to compare performance, but it would have required re-adding my speakers in S1, and I didn’t want to mess up my setup, so I am sticking with S2. 

Anything over 500 ms is an eternity in a consumer app when it comes to small user actions like playing media. It should be < 250 ms or so, which is negligible enough that it feels instant for most people. The Sonos cloud HTTP roundtrip and whatever other S2 changes are clearly taking longer than that. I hope that can be improved further, maybe with local caching, http compression, more cloud-side caching etc.

The playback through the Sonos cloud is my main bug-bearer too, when starting music in a service like Amazon or Apple Music - it does take a while for playback to begin, but it does at least work every time and I am reasonably patient in my old age. However I’d like things in this area to be quicker, but I don’t see such things as being a ‘show-stopper’. It used to take me a lot longer to get an album from my collection and take it from its cover/sleeve and get it playing on a turntable or cd player - so having to wait a few seconds is perhaps not that important, but still nice if the Sonos cloud could get things playing a little quicker.

Where the search bar is at the moment is not an issue for me - I don’t really care where Sonos put it - it still seems to work well for me whenever I do use it and not only helps me find what I’m looking for, but has caused me to go onto explore new music too. I find it incredibly quick to return so many results from all my services or a single music service.

I don’t actually think the new UI is a hot mess. It’s new, and new things take time to adjust to. For example, the swipe/gesture UX is new AFAIK.. I adjusted to it and like it.

However, it does have some issues and could be improved. The only one I felt is truly problematic is how many user actions it takes to get to the search box.. it is too hidden away. The Sonos logo at the top of the app is a terrible use of valuable screen real estate. The left arrow functionality is vague.. < = back.. back to what? Make that a home icon, replace the Sonos logo with a search box = problem solved.  

The play/pause responsiveness remains a bit of an issue. ~1.8 seconds to resume play is too long. Sadly, the S2 app uses Sonos’s cloud whereas S1 worked locally; S2 has to make some HTTP roundtrips to Sonos’s cloud so it will be slower out of the gate, and will probably always be slower unless they reintroduce cloudless playback. The decision to switch away from something that worked to something their engineers surely told them would be slower and their designers told them would cause user friction is beyond me. 

Undoubtedly the new App was released prematurely and some of the documentation may have misled some users that some features were available - not least the "playback options" screen was incomplete, but shown in the online documentation - however Sonos have (and still are) putting that right and apologised and offered extended product warranties etc.

I take it you want them to do more and move faster, but it’s clearly still a work in progress. I’m not sure I can add anything to placate your feelings about it, but no doubt their work is continuing.

I’m sure there were a number of things in the S2 App aswell that new Sonos users did not find intuitive either. It can likely be said of some other Apps too and it can sometime be nice for a user to discover such features for themselves in some instances - it can keep people interested looking or stumbling upon such features IMHO. 

Your point just proves what a mess the app release was when feature were shown in the user guide but not available, without quantifying what would not work at that time.

i can’t recall exactly, but perhaps the feature was added after that user-guide was written? Quite a few things have altered in the past 6 or 7 months and that guide has been there since the App was first launched and even showed some features that were not in the App at the time.

But as stated, not described in the user guide and is not intuitive.

Unless you perhaps mean the ‘Sonos’ above the top screen grab handle - that just does a similar thing to  grab handle and slides away the current screen to return a user to the Home Screen. It’s not exactly difficult and if anything simplifies the App navigation. 
 

edit: our post crossed, I thought afterwards, that might be what you were referring to. I don’t see an issue with this though - especially on tablet devices that have the iOS ellipsis ‘split screen’ option near the top centre of the screen too. The Sonos logo makes things a little easier to return to the Home Screen.

You say the new Sonos app is undoubtedly a much better layout for a mobile phone user. I personally don’t see much difference between new Sonos app and S2, but prefer the tabbed interface of S2. The Account and Settings icons are effectively tabs, even ‘Sonos’ takes you to Home Screen, but the UI is certainly not intuitive for users to know that, unless they tap it by mistake.

There’s always the Sonos online user-guide to assist those that maybe find it difficult to perhaps use the new App. It’s a helpful guide for anyone that’s new to Sonos.

https://www.sonos.com/en-us/guides/sonosapp

Nowhere in that guide does it describe clicking on ‘Sonos’ and the resulting action.

 

I’m not sure the relevance of the ‘System Name’ when the discussion is around the ‘Sonos’ logo which appears in the top middle of the Account and Settings screens.

Nowhere in that guide does it describe clicking on ‘Sonos’ and the resulting action.

There’s always the Sonos online user-guide to assist those that maybe find it difficult to perhaps use the new App. It’s a helpful guide for anyone that’s new to Sonos.

https://www.sonos.com/en-us/guides/sonosapp

 @Ken_Griffiths - the first issue I mentioned is not related to disabling popup messages, it’s the user interface that currently does not work to remove the popup.

Secondly, the slider user interface is not about the responsiveness on the speakers, but the app itself when attempting to use the sliders.

I’m not with my system at the moment, but there was an erroneous play/pause icon on grouping popup. Potentially for the overall group, but the icon does nothing when pressed.

That’s fine, you can be okay with what’s already in the app, it doesn’t stop others expressing their opinions.

You say the new Sonos app is undoubtedly a much better layout for a mobile phone user. I personally don’t see much difference between new Sonos app and S2, but prefer the tabbed interface of S2. The Account and Settings icons are effectively tabs, even ‘Sonos’ takes you to Home Screen, but the UI is certainly not intuitive for users to know that, unless they tap it by mistake.

Yes there is an option to turn off popup messages in ‘App Preferences’, but it’s clearly not working at the moment.

I’m not having this issue, but appreciate that some users are seeing this issue.

Yes I’d like these two features too. I think the hide a room option will be in there at some point (well here’s hoping).

Yes, although it’s rare that I have a dropped speaker issue …and the EQ setting for me is not that important as it’s still accessible.

I’m not sure what you are referring to here?

I’m again okay with what’s available already in the App and have got used to the areas mentioned here, but agree there’s room for improvement. The new App is undoubtedly a much better layout for a mobile phone user.

Here’s a few UI/UX improvements that I would like:

• Ability to easily remove System suggestions (ie. Trueplay speaker ABC) on an iPad Pro as the ’x’ is nearly impossible to select using a finger
• All sliders to be as responsive as they were on S2; Sonos app requires much more precision 
• Ability to see all portable battery %s at a glance
• Ability to hide a room
• Ability to see on System screen if there’s an issue within a Stereo pair room 
• Ability to access EQ settings from Now Playing tab/pop up
• Removal of a play/pause icon on grouping pop up that has no functionality when pressed
• iPad Pro layout to fully utilise the available screen estate
• Any interactions involving swiping to be moved away from the very edge of the screen
• Improved layout for grouped room volumes
• Remove the swipe down action that takes you to Home

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Even my old iPhone XR, which must be at least 4, or 5, years old (probably even older) and perhaps not as fast as more modern mobile devices, does a pretty good job as a Sonos controller with the new Sonos App… The old S2 App seemed to me to be far slower to startup and ‘discover’ my Sonos rooms and be in a position where it was ready to group rooms and play music to my speakers.

I can’t really add anything further ​@Mr. T - I just find the new Sonos works for my system needs and find it extremely simple to use. I can’t truly say I’ve seen that many errors with the App.

It loads much faster than the previous S2 App and never fails to discover all my devices. All the music sources work (except where there’s been a known outage) and I don’t have issues with volume controls like some users mention.

I can’t recall the last audio interruption or dropout either across my rooms or groups. So I have very little to complain about here.

The quote mentioned the Search option, it had nothing to do with local library search not being available at that time.

The UI is much more than simply selecting music to play on a speaker.

As I mentioned above, thankfully Sonos acknowledge the UI Fit and Finish can be improved and have it listed as an ongoing app improvement. Unfortunately, 7mths on since the disastrous release there are still many aspects of the UI that need improvement.

Yeah I read it differently and see it more about the reason why Sonos stepped away from a tabbed interface to make main areas of the App more accessible from everywhere, mostly in just one step and the improvements to the search at that point were more a reference to the local library search.

I’m personally happy with any interface as long as it works and I am able to become quickly familiar with it - I find the new Sonos App does work for my needs and see it as being simple to use. I didn’t need to study a user manual to understand how to navigate around it - I think new users would find it much easier than the old S2 App.

In basic terms it really is a simple matter of slide up the ‘room selector’, choose a room/group and play an audio source from the Home Screen. It doesn’t really get much easier than that.

No, the quote was around UI in general, with an example given. It did also touch on search, so there may be further developments there too.

His actual quote from Reddit is as follows:

The obvious solution is to make all the main areas of the UI (music browse/search, Now Playing, Rooms/System View) accessible from all other areas.  This however takes up a lot of screen real estate with navigation buttons, or forces us into gestures like swipes that can be difficult for new users to discover

The current UI is our attempt, based on a considerable amount of user research, to make the most common navigation operations obvious, but still allow power users to get from each of the areas to the others in one operation.  There are certain compromises that are not ideal in my personal opinion, like the different behavior when tapping vs swiping up on the Now Playing strip at the bottom of the screen, which breaks the physical metaphor of a stack of cards you are shuffling through (as you point out) and we will continue to work hard on optimizing the design.

As the Reddit poster stated, the UI in its current form is a hot mess, which I have to agree with.

I forgot to mention there’s also the button on the ‘mini player’ screen that allows the user to jump directly to the room grouping/ungrouping screen aswell.‍♂️

If I recall the comment Nick Millington made on the Reddit Q&A, it related to the actions performed on the mini-player/slide-up ‘room-selector’ screen.

In the background area of the minimised player at the top of the ‘room-selector’, in the Sonos App, the user ‘taps’ to show the ‘now playing’ screen, or slides ‘up’ to reveal the ‘room-selector’, or touches the volume slider to increase/decrease volume (by 1%) or ‘taps/slides right’ to show group volume screen (in the case where rooms are grouped/displayed in the mini player), or presses and holds the volume button to increase/decrease volume on a room/group… he was concerned that those things were perhaps confusing for the end user and there might be a need to improve the UI/UX at some later point.

It certainly was not a reference to the new Sonos App search feature, which was first introduced in the S2 App as an alternative to the Classic search. That said I guess Sonos will go onto listen to their users/testers and will make any changes they think will help to improve the UI/UX.