Bad app design can have real-world consequences. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is out at the company after a rough 2024 that saw the rollout of a widely panned app redesign followed by an 8% year-over-year drop in revenue and layoffs. Now the company is making changes at the top.
Sonos announced Monday that Spence would step down and board member Tom Conrad, a former executive at the music streaming service Pandora, would serve as interim CEO. Conrad said in a statement he was “excited to work with our team to restore the reliability and user experience that have defined Sonos, while bringing innovative new products to market.”
Sonos said last year ahead of the new app’s unveiling that it was “intentionally redesigned” after a thorough development and testing process to create a faster, easier, personalized experience, but its users didn’t agree. Some complained online about its confusing user interface and missing features, like “play next,” “play last,” alarms, and timers.
“Definitely do not like the app compared to the old one,” one user wrote on Sonos’s community message board last year. “The new app feels way busier, due to everything being thrown at you at once,” and when it came to the app’s aesthetics, “it feels less stylish to me and more cheap.”
While Sonos seemed to think it had made things better, that wasn’t the experience for those actually using the app. The lesson feels similar to that of the fictional startup Pied Piper in HBO’s Silicon Valley when team members learned after launching their app that while it made sense to them, they hadn’t tested it on non-engineers. Like a doctor you can’t understand unless you’ve been to medical school yourself, it’s crucial for professionals to translate their expertise for “normies.” For designers responsible for building apps, that means making sure they’re intuitive for users who don’t build apps for a living.
Last October, Sonos admitted it “fell short when our new app release didn’t meet the standards we promised” and said it had implemented more stringent prelaunch testing with a broader range of customers and that would appoint a quality ombudsperson who would publish twice-a-year reports. Spence, the outgoing CEO, said the following month on Sonos’s earnings call that the company had gone “all-in on our app recovery efforts” and “committed to continuing to improve the software experience on an ongoing basis” with 16 updates.
As Sonos continues to recover from its disastrous app redesign, it would do well to remember that when it comes to user interface, the customer is always right.