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Mike H
Retired Sonos Staff
May 14, 2024
Interview

Sonos App Redesign AMA

  • May 14, 2024
  • 770 replies
  • 65987 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

Headliner I
May 14, 2024

I was hoping I would feel better about Sonos after this AMA, I was wrong I feel worse, much worse.

Lyricist II
May 14, 2024

Sonos now claims that some of the most serious defects will be corrected in the 21 May release, but hopefully the panel can understand that there are a lot of blind people who can’t trust Sonos anymore. Given that Sonos got it so horribly wrong with this current release, why should we expect anything better in the next?

Will Sonos offer an apology to its blind users and accept that it got this wrong, and will Sonos commit to creating a Chief Accessibility Officer as a tangible commitment to ensuring this never happens again?

 

@jmosen

Thank you for your heartfelt feedback. 

 

We invested our user experience and engineering energy on supporting VoiceOver throughout this project. Unfortunately near the end, we took our eye off the ball and missed a couple of key bugs. Those bug fixes have been shipped in a release today.

 

That doesn’t mean we’re done. We have more that we want to do and will do to fine-tune the experience. This is the same kind of fine-tuning we are doing for the visual experience. In a visual UI that means adjusting the gutters between items on screen. In a spoken UI it means adding more hints about how to navigate. We look forward to tweaking those and making the experience get continually better.

I understand that we have to rebuild your trust. We will only be able to do that by improving the experience. Any words we say will be incomplete. I am sorry that we missed this.

 

Our next step involves building a hearty beta community of vision impaired users. Today we have 30 visually impaired users on the beta of the next version of the app. The next version already has several improvements beyond the bug fixes we shipped today.


 

@DianeRoberts As a tangible commitment to accessibility, will Sonos commit to creating a Chief Accessibility Officer? It's highly concerning that your next step involves using external beta testers instead of updating internal processes and expanding company accessibility resources. Though I appreciate your response, it doesn't go nearly far enough to fully address the damage this release has caused. I'm also not convinced that the team has learned from this incident for the next major update for the app.
 

Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

Once again asking here :

 

Can I please get a ETA for users of Airsonic / Subsonic / Bonob who lost their ability to see their library in Sonos please ?

 

Or you just silently dropped the opportunity to run your own service at home. Please at least answer us on that topic.

Seconding this since my original message in this AMA has not been addressed.

Lyricist III
May 14, 2024

@DianeRobertsApps can you confirm the new app is built using Flutter rather than native apps to make a one-size-fits-all app?
What was the reasoning behind this? To save development costs?
I’m failing to see the advantage to the user, it’s slower to open and laggy, missing widgets, when installed on a large screen like a tablet it doesn't make good use of the extra screen real estate. 

@Absolute40

The app is not exclusively built with Flutter, but does make use of Flutter for certain portions of the setup experience. We’ve actually been using Flutter for those experiences for many years, and ported that forward to the new app.

The majority of the app is in fact native. On iOS that means Swift, using SwiftUI. On Android that means Kotlin, using Jetpack Compose. These are the best in class layout engines offered on their respective platforms, and we’re excited to be able to use these modern technologies.

We are aware that there is work ahead for the tablet experience, and look forward to iterating on that as we go forward.

I’m...not crazy about the fact that you’re using Flutter from an accessibility perspective, however I am aware of at least one accessible Flutter app, although it clearly required a lot of bolting on. It’s called Aira Explorer. I encourage you to give it a look if you want to know what is possible with the toolchain you have chosen. Thank you.

Wait, sorry, I screwed up. Swift native? That means there’s real hope of getting this right on iOS at least, and I’ll let Android users comment too. What parts are Swift and what parts are Flutter? This is crucial for accessibility.

DianeRoberts
Sonos Employee
May 14, 2024

My question (as this is an AMA) is this: Do you factor in this loss of trust? Has this been costed? Was there a risk benefit analysis of releasing the app in such an unready state? Or did the the response to this app come as a surprise to you?

@superbob 

We did factor in a risk analysis about delaying some features along with the timing of the release. That risk-benefit analysis was carefully done across many decisions about what to prioritize.

One thing I would like to restate from an earlier reply - we never intended to ship without Alarm Settings.

On the morning of the app launch, we discovered a data corruption error around the new Alarms APIs. The corruption could cause alarms to go off in the wrong room at the wrong volume with the wrong content! In order to save your alarms, we made the difficult decision to remotely disable the alarm settings feature and then completely lock it out. It allowed us to make sure your alarms stayed as they were - but at the steep cost of taking away your ability to change them yourself.

The team rallied to make sure we could turn this feature back on safely - and today we are so delighted to say that we have re-enabled alarm settings. To get this feature, you must do a full system update. 

We will continue to evaluate the impact of new and returning features, and have committed to a timeline for the short term.

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. 

Oh come on, I’m an adult — I don’t need an apology from someone I’ve never met.  And an apology would be derided on here as insincere — the staffers here have been put in an absolutely impossible situation, that absolutely anything they say will be copied, pasted and shot to pieces.  The release schedule up till mid-June already shows some semblance of a plan to make it right.  It’s a bloody app, for god’s sake - it was released too early, it’s buggy and bug fixes are coming.  Many in here need to learn how to behave.  

Avid Contributor I
May 14, 2024

HelloI did the update and there’s still no alarm function back in the app. What do you suggest ???

Lyricist II
May 14, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mod Edit: removed the profanity

 

Sonos: removed everything else 

Enthusiast II
May 14, 2024

Let’s talk about screen equity.

This is from my wall-mounted iPad. 

 

 

Mine does not look like that - I have full screen.

Contributor 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

[...]

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. 

[...]

some people... This is current Google rating of new Sonos app. I think every more comment is unnecessary