Retired Sonos Staff

Interview

Sonos App Redesign AMA

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
May 14, 2024
770 replies
65985 views

The New Sonos App - Community AMA Recap post is now live!

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.

This topic has been closed for further comments. You can use the search bar to find a similar topic, or create a new one by clicking Create Topic at the top of the page.

Show previous replies

U

umiami91

Enthusiast I

I do appreciate the fact that Sonos doesn’t often leave products behind. I get the break with S1 and S2; I don’t get the decision to move off SonosNet. The statement regarding “newer WiFi protocols” just feels like a cop-out.

DianeRoberts

Sonos Employee

Please address the rationale behind the removal of sleep timers and alarms. You must have telemetry showing that these were very heavily used features of the app. And yet now they are gone.

@CacheCoherence - we never intended to ship without Alarm Settings.

(I am copying this in since the threading is difficult to follow here)

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. You can have Alarm Settings back right now!

Update your app to:
1. iOS: 80.00.08 - available now in the App Store
2. Android: 80.00.05 - available now in the Play Store
Update your firmware to 79.0-52294 - available now via the Sonos App:
1. Tap the settings gear in the top right
2. Select “Manage” next to your system name
3. Select System Updates
4. Select Check for Updates
Launch the Sonos app twice in order to guarantee we fetch the latest feature flags:
1. Start the Sonos app
2. Force quit the app
3. Start the Sonos app again

webmink

Prominent Collaborator I

Having a lot of perfectly good equipment resold on the “grey market” is very bad for revenue (look what it did to Sun Microsystems). Given so many customers have said they no longer trust Sonos after the way they have been treated in this app update, will you be taking steps to inhibit grey market sales like you did before (by bricking systems, for example)?

Support musicians by buying music instead of streaming.

G

Graham Kelly

Enthusiast I

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.

Again. Just the alarm as an example, and how well you’ve all done in getting that released today. WHAT ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE WHICH IS MISSING?

rvk

Lyricist III

Please upvote this post: Can you please provide an immediate easy way to rollback the mobile app to the prior version for those who can’t make the current version meet their needs.

Thanks @bkk. Also, @nelliott and others had similar questions.

Rolling back to the previous version of the Sonos app is likely to cause issues. As Sonos continues to advance forward with new updates to the firmware, the old apps will fall out of compatibility quickly. Our priority is to release improvements to the Sonos app rapidly to address your needs.

I think I’ll be upgrading my speakers to the S1 app and when they fail I’ll be moving to a different music system. There is nothing useful for me in the new app and I’ve lost trust in Sonos as a brand.

Unfortunately downgrading to S1 doesn't work correctly in version 80.x. and with 16.1 it says you need the latest version to downgrade to S1. In want this too so I hope this is added back soon.

A

Anonymous

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

Make sure you’ve done the update to the speakers as well.

M

misterstaggs

Lyricist III

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.

Do you really not see how stupid this is?

You clearly had many, many opportunities to do the actually “courageous” thing and just delay the update as it was CLEARLY not ready. This absolute refusal to admit to the reality that Sonos botched this is only making things worse from a PR perspective

D

darksage94

Enthusiast I

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?

[…] 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.

This seems tone deaf.

You’re right, there’s always going to be some degree of negative reception when making changes — “who moved my cheese?”

The question is whether the improvements are a bigger step forward than the limitations are a step back. Are there going to be more positive responses, or negative ones?

Personally, I’m in the Steve Jobs mindset of, paraphrasing, “design isn’t how a thing looks, it’s how a thing works.” If a product works well, then people can overlook the interface shortcomings; if the product doesn’t work well, then no amount of interface glitziness can make up for that.

It has to have been obvious to people there that the new version broke more than it fixed. This is a radical rewrite of an established product, and it has a laundry list of shortcomings compared to its predecessor, as many posts here, on Reddit, and elsewhere have documented.

My question: does anyone there have veto authority on a bad release? How bad to the bugs need to have been to compel someone sufficiently senior to step back and say that this product, as it currently existed, was not good enough to release to the public with the Sonos name?

Some in this forum have suggested that launching a new S3 app could’ve made sense. This seems like a good idea, because it could have offered users a preview of where Sonos is going, while retaining the ability to stick with the more or less stable S2 app until the user decides to switch over.

Of course, it’s too late to do that now, alas, but surely in hindsight it has to be clear that this would’ve been a better way forward.

At this point, we’re all stuck. Your users are left with a semi-functional system, and your software team is stuck with a huge backlog of bugfixes to rush out the door.

Good luck. You need it.

You ask if anybody has the veto. The responses from Sonos in this AMA demonstrates that everybody just keeps smiling at each other and spend the days congratulating themselves for a job well done. Nobody has the gumption to say “sorry, but isn’t this less functional than before?”

I feel that the team who wrote this app and its management are so far removed from the real world that we are all now lost.

I did hope that this AMA would straighten things out. It has done the opposite. It has demonstrated that Team Sonos is just so far up their own posteriors that they cannot see that the world outside is ditching their Sonos equipment.

When you buy into a product that is software based and has the higher price tag for those reasons along with simplicity, it should absolutely be fully functional. I only first purchased my products last year. If I knew this was going to be where things were going, I’d have dealt with my hardwired system.

B

Bsw3

Lyricist I

Can you please explain to me how I am supposed to trust the leadership of this company?

the last week has seen:

-an app marketed as “better” remove core functionality without telling us.

-a chance to receive and review feedback and still sending out promo emails saying the app is better when the consumer base is saying it does jot fulfill user needs.

-a statement praising the company for the release and gaslighting the users who do not like it.

-a statement outlining the dates at which features will be reimplemented meaning you were aware you were marketing a less functionally capable app as “better”

-a timeline of “months” to restore core functionality meaning that from the first promo emails on April 23 you knew that the the app would be functionally inferior to what we already had.

-an announcement of an AMA seemingly in response to the overwhelming negative feedback

-a failure to host the AMA on a host actually capable of facilitating the conversation

-a stunning lack of participation from the admins

-PR speak in response to the most committed customers voicing legitimate complaints.

frankly, the Sonos app launch was a failure. the response has been condescending, patronizing and flat out insulting.

CronoCX

Enthusiast II

Could you please keep the option for the boost going as many people don't receive a strong wi fi signal and extenders and boosters just interfere with the signal and having paided out for a booster cant afford to buy speakers to act as a receiver and don't want the look off speakers everywhere.

Hear, hear!! While I recognize you’re moving away from Boost in the newer speaker lines, please don’t kill it for our older, SonosNet products. Taking all that traffic off the main WiFi has been a valuable benefit of Sonos that doesn’t exist elsewhere.

This. SonosNet is great. While I CAN run everything off WiFi, I chose SonosNet because it seemed the best experience.

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Diane

Kate

Tucker

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