The problem
Each local decision could be reasonable, and still pull the experience apart.
As Sonos expanded into more product categories, offices, and partnerships, more people were making hardware decisions. The organization already had strong UX principles and industrial design guidance, but there was a missing layer between broad experience intent and physical execution.
Hardware UX was still implicit craft. At greater scale, implicit craft becomes inconsistency.
System pressure visual
Show product-category growth alongside a few concrete examples of interaction inconsistency. Keep the examples public-safe and avoid unreleased products.
The approach
We turned tacit expertise into shared language.
I led a collaborative process that collected examples, compared patterns, surfaced disagreement, synthesized working statements, and tested them against real product decisions. The goal wasn’t another document. It was a common language that designers, product partners, and engineers could use together.
We separated durable experience tenets from practical guidelines. The tenets clarified how Sonos should think about hardware interaction; the guidelines translated that intent into repeatable decisions and implementation practices.
Workshop and synthesis artifacts
A sequence of four to six artifacts: examples, clustering, working statements, critique, revision, and testing against live product decisions.
The test
A principle was useful only if it changed a decision.
We connected the framework directly to the product-development process and used active programs to test whether it improved critique, clarified tradeoffs, and created consistency across categories. That kept the work grounded in delivery rather than abstract aspiration.
The process mattered as much as the artifact. The guidelines documented the alignment, but the shared authorship and repeated application created it.
Decision walkthrough
Use one public product example to show a decision before and after applying a hardware UX tenet or guideline. A Sonos Ace interaction could work well here.
What changed
The organization could make better decisions without me in the room.
The framework gave teams a durable way to evaluate hardware interactions as the portfolio and organization evolved. It established portfolio-wide standards across six product families and seven launches, and shifted quality from individual intuition toward shared organizational capability.