Most of us have speakers in our homes in one way or another. While audio systems can be a wonderful experience, setting up and controlling them can often be very frustrating. There are a lot of people that are not audiophiles that want to have a great sound with great versatility, but are not able to do so because of how difficult and complicated the existing products are.

Does audio systems really need to be this hard to use?

There are two main problems that people have with speaker systems today. The first one is the control of the devices. Questions like:

"Which speaker do I want to play right now?"
"Do I want to use the sound from the TV or my phone?"
"Why is it playing from someone else's phone and not mine?"

People usually solve these problems today either by having different speakers for different uses or by reconnecting the sound through a lot of hassle. Neither of these are optimal. The second problem is the control of the sound. Questions like:

"Why are the voices in this movie so low but the music so loud?"
"I wish I could increase the bass this evening since I'm having a party."
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This has partly been solved with a lot of existing Bluetooth headphones with a feature called EQ, but could we take it one step further?

The way I want to solve this is with a central audio hub that lets the customer control all the input sources and output speakers through a single user interface.

Since all the audio goes through this audio hub, we also have the power to change how the audios sounds. We can add features like EQ for example.

The first function of this product system is to control the speakers in your home. You plug your Saga Puck into the speaker with a 3,5mm audio cable and into a power outlet using USB-C. Once that is done you connect the puck to Saga Audio hub wirelessly using Wi-fi. After that you can connect your input source with Bluetooth (smartphones), HDMI (TV), USB-C (computers) or XLR (microphones).

The second thing you can do with Saga is to manipulate the sound. The EQ feature lets the user increase or decrease the volume for different sound frequencies. For example, sometimes you want to increase the lower frequencies to get more bass or increase the mid tones to get clearer vocals. This feature is mostly used when listening to music.

There is another problem that often occurs when watching movies/series with speakers, which is that sounds like vocals are too quiet, but some other sounds, like music, are super loud.

Because of this I added a feature I call Loudness Equalizer. It adds gain to the quieter sound and compresses the loud sounds, using different thresholds as reference points. This will make all sounds more similar in loudness.

You can also go to a "artwork mode" by just clicking anywhere on the home screen. This removes all the controls and makes the device turn into a beautiful artwork that looks good in your home as decoration.

Even though the focus of this project is UX design, not Visual Design, there are still some things about the looks that I want to show you...

Since Saga will often be used listening to music, the UI cannot have a strong aesthetic identity because it could easily clash with the aesthetic of the song. Because of that, I made the UI fairly ordinary in terms of look, basing it mostly on traditional UI metaphors with simple sliders and buttons. However, I did add one feature that I think makes the whole experience a whole lot more immersive.

Saga can generate a new color that automatically fits the colors of the album you are listening to. This color is now used on the audio visualization around the album as well as the volume indicator beside the master slider.

I would finally just like to stress the fact that this project is about UX and that it should not be viewed as a complete design solution. The main reason for that is that I'm not an audiophile myself and do not have the full expertise to make final decisions on how this system should work exactly. For example, since a lot (if not all) speaker have their own hardware integrated volume dial, it could be hard to control the speaker volume externally from Saga. If the speaker is manually turned to zero you could turn the same speaker up to maximum on the Saga UI and the final result will still be zero. This seems like something that could cause problems for the customer. A potential solution to this would be to manufacture custom speakers that are made for Saga, but the point is that this is a complicated system and I couldn't possibly come up with a final solution myself. Therefore I write again that this project a UX vision, nothing more.

Now that I've said that, I hope you enjoyed looking through my project, it's means a lot that people take interest in what I do. If you are interesting in getting in contact with me you can find my email below, perhaps we can work together and make the world a little more beautiful and simple.