Bose Social Speaker
Designing new product concepts to enhance social music listening experiences for Bose
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TIMELINE
Jan. 2025 to May 2025
ROLE
Product designer on a team of 4 for our senior capstone project.
SKILLS & TOOLS
User Interviews
Affinity Mapping
Storyboarding
Figma
Miro
DELIVERABLES
+ Trend Analysis
+ High-quality storyboard designs
+ Final Concept Video
OVERVIEW
In collaboration with Bose, my capstone project explored how people, specifically Gen Z, connect through music—both in shared physical spaces and asynchronous contexts. Our goal was to uncover barriers to social listening, analyze emerging technological and cultural trends, and develop forward-thinking solutions to enhance and redefine the social music experience. With our research, we have created a product to promote all listeners within a social music listening context.
STAGE 1: RESEARCH
In the initial weeks of the project, we conducted secondary research to learn more about the trends in social music listening with in Gen Z. We read reports, such as Spotify's Culture Next report, and took note of key takeaways. We also did 18 user interviews with college students and recent grads, including trend setters such as individuals working at the radio station, writing for the music magazine, or playing in a band. Using our moderators guide, we talked for about an hour with each interviewee, digging deep into their social music listening habits. We brought together all of our research findings and used affinity mapping in Miro to find connections between them. Through this process, we identified 8 social music listening trends, which served as the jumping off point for our ideation sessions.
Miro Affinity Mapping
STAGE 2: IDEATION
We created a how might we statement for a trend and then, setting a timer for 15 minutes, we sketched and wrote out as many ideas and interactions we could think of. We would then come back together as a group and share out. We repeated this for each trend, creating a wealth of concepts to choose from and refine. We then sorted our ideas into digital, physical, and hybrid products and used dot voting to determine our strongest 4 ideas.
We sketched out these 4 concepts in more detail, to develop a stronger image of what these product concepts could become. This gave us a sense of the most promising ideas and we decided to develop the digital universal speaker and the retro speaker further with storyboards. As we discussed what features should be included on these speakers, we pushed the boundaries, making them "weirder" to see how our users would react and receive more useful feedback.
Digital Universal Speaker
"Encompasses all your wants and needs in one"
Digital screen to display the song, artist, album art, and queue
Projector displays lyrics or album art on the wall
Multiple phones can add to the queue
Default album art displays when the speaker isn’t playing music
Retro Speaker
“Back to the future”
AI music recommendations
Physical slider control to adjust parameters of the AI recommendations
Knob to change volume
Knob to access radio stations
AI Music Prompter
Music Inbox
STAGE 3: STORYBOARDING
We developed two storyboards, one for the universal speaker and one for the retro speaker. Following the guidance of our capstone partner's storyboard methods, we used ChatGPT to generate images for each frame of our storyboard and wrote out the narrative in text. Creating accurate images using ChatGPT was a challenge, so we often edited the images using figma and photoshop to fit our exact design needs. Feel free to click through our two concept storyboards below!
Storyboard 1: Universal Speaker
Storyboard 2: Retro Speaker
STAGE 4: USER FEEDBACK
After developing these two storyboards, we brought our designs back to our users for more feedback. First, we conducted 9 one-on-one feedback sessions to receive detailed information about their reactions to the two products. This helped identify initial strengths and weaknesses of our designs and gave insight into parts of storyboard that were confusing. After refining our storyboards based on this feedback, we wanted to reach a larger set of users, so we set up our storyboards in the cafe atrium and talked with 19 students about the designs. Due to the fast-paced nature of these atrium intercepts, we split our team of 4 into pairs so that one person could note take while the other asked the questions.
STAGE 5: DESIGN REFINEMENT
With all of this feedback, we used Miro to organize it into a format we could use to inform our final product decisions. This process identified the positive and negative attributes of each design, so we combined the best of both speakers to create a final product fit to bridge the gaps social music listening.
Our final speaker concept had 6 key features geared to making social music listening as smooth and enjoyable as possible:
As the project came to a close, we created a final concept video that brings the product to life, illustrating how people would interact with the speaker day to day. We wrote the voiceover script, planned each frame, generated all the images with detailed prompts in ChatGPT, and brought it all together into one video using iMovie. We presented this video to Bose as our final project deliverable. You can watch the video here:
CLIENT REACTIONS
“Something I love so much about this is just how thoughtful and detail oriented this design is. I think there are so many micro interactions that help to solve problems that really smooth over this friction.”
“In the iteration and in listening to users and incorporating their feedback, all of you have been so thoughtful in how to address those pieces, to really create an experience that makes everyone feel included.”
“It's phenomenal to to be a part of this work and to watch you all excel in this process and exemplify what a good user interaction designer and product and user advocate looks like. I'm impressed with all of your work.”
“The thinking is just really nice, really high level. I love a lot of the stuff there, and do want to go pursue these next steps and do some of these experiments and all that. Excellent, thoughtful work.”
TAKEAWAYS
This project taught me how to:
Take a broad project mission and carry it from user research and concept ideation to a high quality product concept
Conduct in-depth secondary research and analyze the trends to develop key insights
Lead effective ideation sessions focused on generating as many ideas as possible
Refine design concepts through multiple rounds of user feedback sessions
One really valuable moment from this project was when I realized the importance of returning to our key research insights to inform design decisions. We had just finished conducting feedback sessions on our two main storyboard concepts and our users had not reacted positively to the AI features on the retro speakers design. Looking back at our insights helped us identify why our users weren't resonating with it. In the retro speaker design, AI had complete control over what music was playing. Based on our user interviews, we learned that Gen Z feels frustrated by AI tools that make the music decisions or help people discover new music because it often didn't understand the music well enough and would put songs with clashing vibes together in the same queue. However, we found that Gen Z did enjoy the more entertaining, minor uses of AI in their music listening such as Spotify's daylist. So, we pivoted and redesigned our final speaker to use AI only for additional entertainment, such as an AI generated top listened to genre of the listening session, instead of core music selection functionality.
Arcadia Ohnemus arcadia.ohnemus@gmail.com LinkedIn
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