Audio App

Challenge

Bang & Olufsen, HP's Audio Brand, approached our team to help them improve the audio experience on HP Computers. This involved rethinking the user flow and understanding how our customers currently use the preexisting audio application. The challenge was to enhance or improve the overall audio quality/experience for our users.

The Approach

Our lack of domain knowledge in PC Audio meant we needed to understand the customer behavior and pain points thoroughly and quickly. We approached all aspects of the project collaboratively and spent most of our time collecting data, both quantitative and qualitative. This app was buried in the system tray and we had no data provided on the usage or awareness of such app. Because of the lack of quantitative data we had, I led an initiative to first instrument the existing audio control with Google Analytics. We tracked the launch rate, which features were used the most, how long users were in the app. 

My Role

This project took place between July 2015 and April 2016. I worked on this project as a Product Manager for the Customer Experience Portfolio Strategy Group.I was responsible for the research, redesign and product definition for the B&O Audio Control. 

Understand, Unpack, Uncover

"Why would audio enthusiasts need this app?" 

We created several surveys and conducted interviews to understand how our 'audio enthusiasts' would interact with this app and increase the level of engagement and usage. These interviews completely changed the direction of where we were going with the app, which was a simple redesign. We soon found that our target user's engagement will naturally die after they found the perfect audio settings. It is not likely for them to be adjusting their audio ALL the time- in fact, that may not be a good sign for HP (yikes). 

"What is the true pain point we are solving for?" 

We came to realize that this app had very insignificant customer value, even though it met a huge business and partnership value to HP and Bang & Olufsen. My personal goal quickly became to finalize on the customer journey and goal and to drive an elegant solution for any gaps, rather than supporting a product with no added customer value.

"To this day, I'm surprised we do not have an accessible tool to quickly change or switch between different audio devices." said one user participant

Having EQs, audio enhancements were valuable but considered 'nice to haves' and our users were in general satisfied with their PC Audio Experience. 

After having done user research on initial concepts and understanding of our target users, we had 3 takeaways.

Visual Style

Inspired by B&O's own audio software for their wireless speakers and the minimal style of their products. We drew inspiration from Bang & Olufsen hardware and software, websites and branding to help keep our app consistent with their visual styling. These are original variations and concepts our designers mocked up below. We iterated and tested these until we landed on our final product! Hope you enjoy. 

Adjusting to Findings

Shortly after we finished skinning this app to make it more appealing for our audio partner, our team refocused on finding a solution to easily allow users to switch between their speaker and microphone outputs/inputs. We decided from an information architecture perspective it made sense to bundle the audio app and what we call the Audio Switch together but layer based on importance. Our criteria was not to have several different audio apps for our users to navigate. 

We wireframed and tested this idea of having a system tray app, and we received validation from our users. This small differentiator is now shipping on all HP platforms and has an extremely high launch rate suggesting to us that it is useful and solving a pain point for our users. We're proud to be shipping an easier to use solution.