Shure AONIC Headphones
The new listening line from Shure
Role: Lead UX Designer
Engineered from decades of studio experience, the AONIC line boasts the long-term value and professional performance that the most discerning listeners demand, ensuring today’s music lovers, audiophiles, and musicians are able to have the most premium listening experience – on the train, in the gym, or at home.
Role
As the lead UX designer in the listening category, I was responsible for the holistic user experience from software applications, and hardware interaction to unboxing experience to make sure we are bringing an intuitive product experience. I led design on how users interact with the headphones, how the buttons work, or where the buttons go and collaborated with the industrial design team and user research team.
Working side by side with different stakeholders, I gained a lot of experience on how UX fits into the hardware and software development cycles since the paces are fundamentally different but dependent on each other. I learned a lot working in SAFe Agile environment as a UX advocate!
Process
Prior to the project planning stage, the team gathered up to go over the high-level road map and the determined different markets we are targeting toward based upon the personas. The UX team then started diverging different ideas on “What do our users want?“ and “What can we do better?“. Shure has a long history of the listening line, as we start expanding our target to a prosumer basis, we would like to keep our tradition of outstanding sound quality with the incorporation of modern technology.
The team consolidated competitor analysis from numerous competitors on the market and conducted a thorough heuristic evaluation on major brands as we firmly believe intuitive experience comes from the cohesive experience on both software and hardware.
UX team constantly works with user researchers to perform qualitative research on hardware interactions and test out different app design ideas periodically.
Case Study - Interaction Pattern on Headphone Control
Shure is always well-known in pro and hi-fi listening world but is new to the world of wireless listening for general consumers. The team traveled to Rocky Mountain Festival in Denver and Fujiya-Avic festival in Tokyo to research how people use Bluetooth headphones in the early phase to learn user needs. By conducting both Guerilla Research and Interview sessions, the team learned a lot about how users use Bluetooth headphones, the preferred areas where the buttons should be located, and the preferred hardware inputs.
The team used sticky Velcro on the headphones and let users point out where they could be looking for buttons, then the team analyzed where most users reach on their devices. (Kind of like heatmap in 3D spaces!)
Case Study - Device Home
By doing rounds of user interviews to figure out what are the most important features for headphones users, we then decided noise canceling and ambiance settings are on the top level, and all the button customization settings prompt selection..etc live underneath to reduce cognitive load.
Case Study - Device Walk-through
Customers don’t look at user guides nowadays. The app provides an intuitive step-by-step guide to walk users through how to connect to their headphones.
Device walk-through for different headphones
Case Study - Firmware Update Process
AONIC headphones users are able to keep their headphones up to date to receive latest features and robust experience. Below is the flow of how firmware update works.
Firmware Update Flow
Case Study - Headphone Equalizer
To provide high-end features for headphones users, AONIC users are able to save their listening settings on their headphones to tailor to their own tastes. PLAY app already supports software equalizers. According to some usability testing performed, the same visualization confuses users and people who use wireless headphones don’t have the same level of knowledge compared to audiophiles.
The following designs are two different concepts and visualization treatments of how users generate their own headphone equalizer.
Outcome
The hardware control is part of ShurePlus Play app on the app store currently. We got A LOT OF reviews from including Soundguys, The Verge, WhatHifi…etc.
THE BEST NOISE-CANCELING HEADPHONES TO BUY RIGHT NOW
It is easy to find the raised multifunction button for accessing Google Assistant, which is supremely useful for setting timers while baking.