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Mike H
Retired Sonos Staff
May 14, 2024
Interview

Sonos App Redesign AMA

  • May 14, 2024
  • 770 replies
  • 65990 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

Enthusiast II
May 14, 2024

Hi AMA team!
I almost always use my Sonos devices in groups, and with the new app, handling of group volumes is worse. Not only does it not change in real-time like the former app, you end up with a UI pop-up on top of the volume slider I am using to adjust the volume. See the video below of before and after. Will this be fixed in a future app update? 

@mdpeterman

A key part of this new app was using the newer Sonos APIs, which means we did indeed rewrite the volume experience entirely.  Until this new update, our app was using an older set of technology based on UPnP and SOAP.

Thank you for sharing the videos. I will make sure the team sees these so that we can continue to iterate and improve in upcoming releases.

Why should users care about which APi’s you are using?
Such arguments are typical for software dev kids, but seeing this from Senior Director of Software Development…. No words.

Enthusiast II
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.

 

I think (and hope) you mean S2. S1 is the old original app now used by owners of legacy products. Because Sonos loves creating legacy products.

Renowned Enthusiast II
May 14, 2024

Moving forward…

 

it’s getting exhausting, reading all of these comments, most of which I agree with. This is what I’d like to see going forward:

-  a true apology from the leaders of this company for the app debacle

- A sincere promise that this same thing won’t happen again in the future

- A list, posted on the Sonos forum, showing all the requests that users have made to restore functions and for new functions, to show Sonos is aware of what users really want. If something a user wants isn’t included on the list, they could post a comment in a dedicated thread to add to the list in a constructive fashion. 

neilmcg
Enthusiast II
May 14, 2024

@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.

 

But, @KateW - why release it before it was ready? You must admit that a product without feature parity is a regression. Regardless of the glowing future that awaits.

You could have Beta’d this for another month and launched in a much more solid position. Maybe with some of these new cloud services.

Some of your customers / users also work in the industry and know what goes on, regarding technology debt, re-factoring, etc.

Frankly not owning this situation - especially to those of us who are looking at this objectively - not great, really not great.

 

Enthusiast II
May 14, 2024

I’ve only observed up till now.  There are only three respondents to, what — 400 users here ?  While the Sonos replies are too few and too infrequent, they each generate further exponential posts, many just to get in a snarky response.  This was never going to work.  There have been plenty of pertinent questions posed, but also far too much mud-slinging which was never going to add anything.  Maybe next time, a different platform for the Q&A, and hopefully a few more adults in the room.  

I think if they would have come out and apologized right away and then laid out some semblance of a plan to make it right - they could have changed this trajectory quickly. 

Enthusiast I
May 14, 2024

 

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.

I understand this. What I don’t understand is, why you don’t roll back the new app completely, give us the old app back, work on the new one for another 6-12 months and only release it when UAT shows that it really is quicker, feature complete and stable?

I know it’s all about shareholder value, however isn’t the best way to boost that by building a really good product?

Lyricist II
May 14, 2024

Feature Request: Please add the ability to customize the “currently playing” screen. It currently shows the album/station cover and a few tags, but it would be nice to be able to customize which ones are shown (tags like composer, album artist, etc).

Also, please (re)add the ability to make it full screen for display purposes with a tablet landscape mode like the previous version had. Thank you!

Lyricist I
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.

I don’t think anybody is asking for you to support the old app forever, but if you’re going to force an update like this, even though you know you’re removing many features that have been there for years, then you need to give customers an option to wait it out.

 

These responses make it seem like you had no choice to push out this half finished app and you don’t care at all about your customers. I haven’t seen a single apology or anything from Sonos that acknowledges this was a bad idea. Just corporate BS about how much work it was to get this app half finished before you pushed it out to the world and you’ll get around to making work as well as the old one at some point in the future. Nobody cares what API technologies you’re using in the background if they can’t use the app.

Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

Let’s talk about screen equity.

This is from my wall-mounted iPad. 

 

 

CronoCX
Enthusiast II
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.

One thing there, having some fonctionality ( NAS playback) in the event my internet goes down is cool. Please make sure it fallback as gracefully as possible in that case. 

@DianeRoberts: Can you please provide some details on what Cloud Services look like for Users who use Local Libraries? I hope that if there is an Internet outage that Local Music will be able to be played to a Local Sonos speaker.

No App or Device should get in the way of playing Local Music to a Local Sonos Speaker.

Period.