Designing a new kind of product

Designing a new kind of product: software for game sound engineers and composers

When the client approached us and explained what they needed help with, we were kind of baffled. The software that they were building is a desktop app which is used by sound engineers and composers working in a very interesting niche: gaming. At first we were a bit intimidated seeing that none of the people in our team at the time were musicians, but we did have gaming experience, as well as experience with using similar software.

Challenges

By far the biggest challenge was to gain domain knowledge, for which we leveraged the massive experience possessed by the stakeholders. Our team soaked in every bit of knowledge they selflessly shared, and we used it to design a digital product in a category which actually doesn’t yet exist.

Solutions

After an initial period of intense knowledge transfer sessions, we’ve quickly identified that our best way forward was to make the stakeholders an equal, and integral part of the design team. We’ve worked together constantly not just by requesting and giving feedback, but actually working together in Figma, and talking through problems, weighing out decisions, and discussing options.

Outcomes

The actual expertise in software design and development possessed by the stakeholders, as well as their openness to a non-standard design process — one which is much more demanding on their time — ensured that the result of our collaboration is an application not only useful to sound engineers and composers as a dedicated piece of software for their craft, but is a joy to use, compared to the tools they were using at the time.