BOSE PROFESSIONAL SYSTEMS

The Engagement

Bose is composed of three branches of business - Professional Systems being one of them. I was brought on to develop and integrate UX design into the organization. My role consisted half of managing UX resources as we worked through design challenges for the different products (like Modeler, Tangram, and Control Space Designer) and half of developing a new process which integrated UX design and evangelising UX within the organisation.

Process Design

Being a hardware driven company, the design and build process was very different than that we usually see within agencies and software product companies. For one thing - the process is much longer than in software, with many more disciplines, and the philosophy of getting an MVP out to the market is very different. To compound that - Bose is an engineering led organization, where UX was not fully understood.

The team was already refining their design and build process, and in order integrate UX into it, I began first by listening to the needs of our stakeholders (fellow engineers) unearthing when and where they most needed UX input. I also educated them on what we could do and what our process looked like. Then, together, we began editing the process with a staged rollout approach. (That process is proprietary and quite large so is not posted here.)

Where we ended up was largely a waterfall process, but one where there was space for UX agile sprints within specific parts of the overall process (like during concepting.)

Role: Change Management, Stakeholder Meetings, Process Development

Team Skills Development

As UX designers, we often have to dive deep into an area that we do not know in order to become experts to some level. That paradigm was only intensified at Bose where the products and our customers (the creators of those products) were ultra specialized and complex.

In order to help reduce the ramp up time for designers I worked to create a few one pagers that simplified and distilled the core concepts which our products were based on.

Activities: Secondary research, stakeholder interviews, in situ product visits

Role: Head of UX (Product and Sound research, Infographics creation)

Bringing User Testing to Feature Selection

The Bose process had inefficiencies due to the fact that testing of concepts and designs was not integrated into the process. In our efforts to combat this, and to show institutional value, we devised a series of product and concept tests for the Tangram product. One of those exercises was a card sorting test where sound engineers were asked to tell us how they like to approach designing the audio installation for a space. These results were key in helping us refine our designs.

Activities: Observation of Installation, Card Sorting, Data Distillation, Experience Design

Role: Head of UX (active role in all parts)