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Mike H
Retired Sonos Staff
May 14, 2024
Interview

Sonos App Redesign AMA

  • May 14, 2024
  • 770 replies
  • 65991 views
Sonos App Redesign AMA

Today is the day of the AMA!

The new app design has been out for a week, and most of you have had a chance to get used to the new UI.

Some of you might have questions when you have had a week to get to know the new Sonos App interface. Because of that, we want to give you all a chance to ask some of the people who were integral in its creation and design, the questions that have come to mind while you have used the app.

As we mentioned in the event.

Our panelists will be:

  • Diane Roberts, Senior Director of Software Development
  • Kate Wojogbe, Senior Director of User Experience
  • Tucker Severson, Director of Product Management

It will be hosted on the 14th of May from 11:00 until 14:00 GMT -07.

But instead of me telling you what they do and what their role with the app update has been, here are their own introductions:

 

Diane

Diane Roberts is the Senior Director of Software Engineering and Product Management at Sonos responsible for the Sonos Apps. Her group of cross-disciplinary teams build Configuration, Control, and Content experiences on a foundation of Core mobile application technologies. She received dual Bachelors’ of Science in Computer Science and Music from WPI. Diane holds 6 granted patents as a co-inventor.

 

Kate

As Senior Director of User Experience, Kate leads the UX team responsible for Sonos’ home audio hardware, software, and app user experiences. This includes user interfaces on speakers and soundbars, setup for hardware and services, first and third party content experiences, and a variety of methods of control of the Sonos system. Kate graduated from the University of California Los Angeles with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Design.

 

Tucker

Tucker Severson is the Director of Product Management and leads the PM team responsible for the Sonos Apps. Tucker received his BA from Bates College and his MBA from the University of Vermont.

 

We will do our best to answer as many of your questions as possible within the 3-hour window, but we can’t promise to answer every question, especially those you know we can’t discuss.

But if we see a question repeated or a reply getting a lot of likes, don’t worry. We will prioritize those to ensure that many people get the answers they seek.

 

Remember, we can’t talk about things on the roadmap - but if you have questions or feedback about the app redesign, want to know more about our panelists, like their background or favorite band, then the sky is the (cough cough.. NDA) limit!

Thank you, everyone, for participating. We covered as many of the most asked questions as possible. We know tracking the responses wasn't as easy as we had hoped. But we wanted to let the community air frustrations and have their questions answered.

I got a lot of DMs during the AMA, and I will be sure to answer them when I can. Thanks for reaching out!

Keith and I will work on recapping all the questions and feedback we have responded to, and we will update the post here when that is complete. If we didn't get to your question, don't worry. Keith and I are grabbing all the feedback from this thread, even the things we didn't respond to, and ensuring the right people will see the message. This was the first time we created a live AMA in the community, and we learned a lot for future AMAs.

We appreciate all the feedback and questions you gave through this AMA. It helps us understand your most significant feedback and your reasoning. We hear you, and we will ensure the right teams get your feedback. They are listening.

We look forward to rolling out the updates with features (new and old) as soon as they are ready. Keith shared an overview of the timeline for expecting these features to return to the app. Today was the first update, reintroducing alarms and improving the iOS voiceover.

We look forward to seeing your reactions to our future app developments. We hope you all appreciate the work our developers are putting into making the app as fast and easy to use as possible for the general user.
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770 replies

Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

Has the AMA team been sacked?

 

Well they should be this is pathetic

Lyricist II
May 14, 2024

What has been the general mood of the Sonos team/staff since the new app was released? Was the team surprised at the negative reception or was it expected?

@GuitarSuperstar

Thanks for asking. We have all been deeply invested in this project for a long time. We are all Sonos owners. Many people on the team had Sonos in their homes before they joined the team. We all use the experience every day. 

Any time we change an experience or delay a feature, we know that some people will have negative sentiments. We also saw in our usability testing that people appreciated the new user interface, adaptability, and faster time to music. 

We have been reading your posts and seeing your feedback.

Once the release went live, the mood could be described as “energized.”  The activity on the team is high as people share what they’ve built for the next releases. We are excited that we can bring these continuous regular updates. It’s easier and faster now for us to share what we’ve built with you. That started with today’s release and will continue on May 21st with releases to follow.

"We know that some people will have negative sentiments"…

In all seriousness can you just not say "sorry we made a mistake...." And STOP telling us how amazing the new app has been to work on. It's bad. It's difficult to use. And you can't q up the next song. The idea that the team is energised to share the latest thing they've built (which was what they killed) is truly *laughable*

You CANNOT look at this app. Sit back and go. "Cracking. Great job lads....! We've cracked it"

Just say sorry.....please acknowledge the error.....we're just begging you for some humanity. 

Mod Edit: removed profanity

Enthusiast I
May 14, 2024

What has been the general mood of the Sonos team/staff since the new app was released? Was the team surprised at the negative reception or was it expected?

@GuitarSuperstar

Thanks for asking. We have all been deeply invested in this project for a long time. We are all Sonos owners. Many people on the team had Sonos in their homes before they joined the team. We all use the experience every day. 

Any time we change an experience or delay a feature, we know that some people will have negative sentiments. We also saw in our usability testing that people appreciated the new user interface, adaptability, and faster time to music. 

We have been reading your posts and seeing your feedback.

Once the release went live, the mood could be described as “energized.”  The activity on the team is high as people share what they’ve built for the next releases. We are excited that we can bring these continuous regular updates. It’s easier and faster now for us to share what we’ve built with you. That started with today’s release and will continue on May 21st with releases to follow.

 

 

Surely, you are joking here.  If all your team has Sonos kit in their homes, they would have all been moaning in the office - like the rest of your customers.  Please stop treating your customers like fools.  

“Faster time to music” is rubbish if you can’t control the group volume.  

“Energized”.  Is ‘energized’ another word for suicidal?

Where is the apology?  Your feeds are all about ‘you’.  It’s apparent that all the feedback being provided by your customers here is not injecting any humility into the Sonos folks on this AMA.  

Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

Two hours in and here we are (numbers in brackets are the count at 1 hour)

@DianeRobertsApps - 4 (0)

@KateW - 5 (3)

@tuckerseverson - 3 (2)

 

One has to wonder if they have to run every response past corporate laywers given the amount of time it seems to take them.

 

And some stats of my own counting:

Respect shown to customers - 0

Horrific discoveries - 2

  • Data corruption issue in alarms didn’t stop a release.
  • All speakers now available on the public internet protected only by a users password.

Feedback/suggestions actually taken by Sonos - 0

Destruction to the company’s goodwill: Priceless.

Not sure they had much of that to loose after the S1/S2 debacle.

May 14, 2024

In case no-one has noticed yet, local Music Libraries are now BROKEN with the 80.00.08 release.  They disappeared from the IOS apps and an update to the Mac Desktop app errors out when trying to add them. (Error 913)

 

Standing ovation. 

Nope — just did the upgrade, now more stable for me as they would come and go off the Home Screen.  Now they are more usable for me. 

Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

I am very concerned with the lack of security. Specially since 90% of Sonos products have microphones built-in. All these speakers are now exposed to the web https://play.sonos.com. At minimum add 2FA before someone gets any funny ideas.

DianeRoberts
Sonos Employee
May 14, 2024

Hi @DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the reasoning behind the decision to “upgrade” S2 app rather than create a new S3 app with the new design and put S2 into maintenance mode as you did with S1 app?

Hi @KateW the UX of the new app is very laggy and unresponsive, frequently displaying error messages, please explain why it was released like this and what you are doing to resolve it.

Hi @DianeRobertsApps are you able to explain why Sonos decided to make the app cloud-based, what are the advantages apart from extra latency making the app seem slow?

 

Hi @Absolute40 ,

Regarding the idea of a separate app, the problem with this approach is that the functionality between these apps would diverge over time, leaving a large group of users with an out of date and potentially not fully supported experience.

Regarding responsiveness, I am sorry to hear you are having a bad experience. There are many factors that can contribute to this. We built the app to gather telemetry and data around these error states so we can continue to resolve issues for all users.

There are many advantages to using the cloud, but I’ll highlight one. With our new content services, we are able to provide a richer experience for discovering music to listen to. Our previous app was built on APIs that did not provide enough metadata to make that rich experience. 

It’s also important to note that the app is not exclusively cloud-based. We still interact with the speakers on the local network, similar to the old app. We will be continuing to fine tune when we use cloud or local APIs. And we are already working on performance enhancements across the stack.

rvk
Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

I want to downgrade to S1. But that isn't possible with the latest version and when trying with 16.1 it says I need the latest version. 

At least S1 including its app worked (and isn't accessible via the internet ;) ).

 

Hopefully downgrading back to S1 is added soon.

 

Enthusiast II
May 14, 2024

What has been the general mood of the Sonos team/staff since the new app was released? Was the team surprised at the negative reception or was it expected?

@GuitarSuperstar

Thanks for asking. We have all been deeply invested in this project for a long time. We are all Sonos owners. Many people on the team had Sonos in their homes before they joined the team. We all use the experience every day. 

Any time we change an experience or delay a feature, we know that some people will have negative sentiments. We also saw in our usability testing that people appreciated the new user interface, adaptability, and faster time to music. 

We have been reading your posts and seeing your feedback.

Once the release went live, the mood could be described as “energized.”  The activity on the team is high as people share what they’ve built for the next releases. We are excited that we can bring these continuous regular updates. It’s easier and faster now for us to share what we’ve built with you. That started with today’s release and will continue on May 21st with releases to follow.

@DianeRoberts thanks for taking the time to respond to these questions, but just interested to know (and I mean this seriously, not sarcastically) if any of the sonos owners there use their own library, and realised that removing all the functionality around that (with the exception of a very long scroll to get to ZZ Top) was something that should have been included from day one. of the new app? It seems from a lot of the forums (the sonos community, reddit, the press etc.) and comments here that there are a large number of users who use that functionality, and indeed bought their sonos systems just for that functionality.

Was that just a huge oversight by a team of people who only stream music, and never buy their own, or was there some other valid development reason for not including it… ?

KateW
Sonos Employee
May 14, 2024

@KateW 

When the app was getting ready to be released, what were your personal feelings regarding the new app?

Did you anticipate that it would be so poorly received? 

@Sam_5  Hi Sam - I've personally been excited to bring the experience to our users, but also understand that anytime you are making a change to an interface that someone uses, you're going to be met with a breadth of reactions, and understandably some negative ones, simply due to the nature of change. We knew that some customers would be understandably upset by the delay in certain features, but are eager to continue to roll out updates to ensure these features are in place, and to address the feedback we are getting from our users. I'm thankful to have an app that is easier for the team to work with and publish updates to with far greater frequency than we've had in the past.

UX at Sonos