After the absolute shitshow and riots around the release of the new app, which missed core functionalities and broke systems, Sonos did participate in their promised Ask Me Anything. Kind of. Three Sonos employees apparently attended, but managed to barely respond to any of the questions – which were almost all overwhelmingly angry, disappointed and hoping for control of their expensive machines.
Diane Roberts, Senior Director of Software Engineering and Product Management at Sonos responsible for the Sonos Apps managed to answer 9 questions
Tucker Severson, Director of Product Management and leads the PM team responsible for the Sonos Apps managed to answer a grand total of four questions
Kate, Senior Director of User Experience, Kate leads the UX team responsible for Sonos’ home audio hardware, software, and app user experiences got in six answers
Most of the answers given were disrespectful corporate shitspeak, blaming the customers for wanting the features they already had or alluding to how ‘energized’ the team was to roll out features in the future.
None apologised or seemed to even acknowledge the > 750 complaints about the new app.
None of these head honchos had ever even looked at the Sonos forum before! This is where they would have been able to see problems that people really had before embarking on their app redesign adventure.
Some guy called Mike – the Sonos employee left after the original people ran away posted an insulting closing comment, saying
We covered as many of the most asked questions as possible. We know tracking the responses wasn’t as easy as we had hoped. But we wanted to let the community air frustrations and have their questions answered.
Not very much seemed to be possible, not many questions were answered and the community was left more frustrated than it began.
Keith and I will work on recapping all the questions and feedback we have responded to
Again, if that’s going to be the recap, Sonos is going to miss absolutely everything that people were upset about.
A feature list was linked to: The New Sonos App and Future Feature Updates which put things like playing your own music and being able to update WiFi settings to mid-June, meaning you can hardly use the system if you rely on music you bought instead of streamed.
Source: Sonos App Redesign AMA | Sonos Community
Robin Edgar
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