Vibeset — An immersive sound bath experience
Client
Sonic Age Inc. is a sound engineering startup based in Los Angeles, United States, specializing in audio engineering and immersive sound experiences. Team consists of experienced audio engineers and talented musicians from around the globe.
High Level Goal
To create their first product, Sonic Age Inc. is focusing on delivering exclusive sound bath meditation sessions and immersive experiences with the highest quality, lossless audio.
Additionally, partner with Sonic Age Inc. in the development of the Vibeset product and overall brand identity. This involves creating a robust product strategy and vision that align with their business goals and objectives for the future.
My Role
As a Senior Product Designer at Very, I collaborated with Sonic Age Inc. stakeholders and marketing team, as well as Very's engineers and project managers, to develop the Vibeset MVP iOS application. The application includes features such as Authentication, Onboarding, Sessions Catalog, Live Events and Maestros Profile.
Collaborating with cross-functional teams and facilitating workshops, gather feature requirements, assess technical feasibility, conduct user research, and advocate for Vibeset's product strategy of providing an immersive sound bath experience.
Tools
Figma
Stark
Mobbin
Maze
TestFlight
Our Approach
Understanding the Challenge: We conducted a series of interviews with potential customers to understand how sound bath sessions could reduce stress and provide relief in their lives. Additionally, we met with Sonic Age Inc. experts to gain a deep understanding of how certain frequencies can heal the body and improve overall mindset.'s product strategy of providing an immersive sound bath experience.
Analyze, Ideate, Prioritize: We studied competitors in the industry to identify potential advantages, patterns, and opportunities. This process involved gathering ideas and prioritizing them based on immediate business strengths, needs, and technical feasibility.
Design through Collaboration: Design is a collaborative process. We worked closely with stakeholders, developers, and sound engineering experts to gather feedback and create a cohesive app supported by the established design system.
Setting Up for the Future: In an agile workflow, our mindset is always iterative. We prepared the product to provide value, address user needs, accommodate potential business expansions, and offer a unique proposition in the market.
Understanding the Challenge
Firstly, we conducted a series of workshops to truly understand our client, including their needs, ideas, and expectations for their new product intended for market introduction. This provided us with a deeper understanding of their objectives and how we could align with their mission of healing through sound.
Next, we collaborated with their sound experts and engaged with diverse potential users to gather their perspectives and gain a clearer vision of Vibeset's potential app. These interviews aimed to encompass insights from both business and sound experts, with a primary focus on user insights. These insights helped us define target personas, identifying clear patterns and pain points to better shape the feature scope and product vision.
Drawing from the data collected from interviews, conversations, and overall card sorting exercises, we outlined ideal target personas. These personas represent the majority of our users and serve as the ideal profiles to sell this solution. With these personas, we address key pain points, reveal desires and motivations, and identify pain points. These personas serve as our reference for making design decisions throughout the process, ensuring a user-centered approach.
The vision for Vibeset was to create a product that could expand across multiple channels or platforms. To achieve this, we established principles to guide every future business expansion, new designs, or features. We hosted a design principles workshop to set these guidelines, ensuring our focus remained sharp and decisions were streamlined. Here are some of our established principles:
Our members have a safe space to confidently create their own journey
An immersive experience engendered by the sounds, visuals and players of the instruments that create it
In service to our community and sustained through trust
Welcoming and approachable, easily discoverable, and grounded in science
Analyze, Ideate, Prioritize
We initiated the phase by conducting an analysis of potential market competitors to identify their product value, design patterns, strengths, weaknesses, and areas where Vibeset could differentiate itself and provide unique value. This involved using their apps to evaluate user experience, features, and how users might perceive these products.
Through understanding the competitors and their offerings, we gained valuable insights into industry standards and opportunities. We discovered that while many competitors offer guided meditation, only a few provide limited sound bath sessions. This positioned Vibeset uniquely to lead the sound bath market, catering to both beginners and experienced users.
Building upon this initial research, we began ideating potential features and initial user flows based on industry standards and design patterns. This allowed us to envision the potential MVP of the iOS application and future feature enhancements, including long-term features and AI capabilities. A brainstorm workshop helped us document all possible features and align them with business goals and potential revenue sources.
With the brainstorm portion completed, we prioritized for the near future. We determined that our MVP version needed to deliver high-quality, immersive sound bath sessions. Thus, we focused our efforts and feature scope around realizing this vision. Through a Needs & Wants & Desires workshop, we organized the brainstorm into immediate needs, wants for post-MVP features and feature enhancements, and future product desires.
With the MVP features identified, we started working on user flows and feature mapping to define the information architecture of the app. This involved organizing features logically and intuitively and mapping technical and accessibility aspects.
Design through Collaboration
During this phase, we began wireframing the user flows, focusing on information architecture to ensure an excellent user experience for our target personas. These wireframes serve as the foundation of our app, enabling our team to gather rapid feedback from stakeholders and iterate on design concepts quickly, always maintaining a user-centric approach.
One of the business objectives defined in the early stages of the process was to scale the iOS application and extend the product to other platforms such as Android, Web, and eventually a VR application. With this objective in mind, we established a design system that fosters a unified experience and visual language. This not only allows us to deliver a more consistent user experience for the MVP but also places Sonic Age Inc. in a favorable position to scale their product portfolio, speeding up development efforts while maintaining a cohesive visual language and user experience.
During this phase, we implemented recurring design review meetings, providing an open space for stakeholders and team members to express their feedback and concerns regarding the technical feasibility of every flow and feature. This ensures consensus on the user experience, visual design, approach, and involvement of the entire team in the design decision-making process, fostering a more collaborative effort.
In the final step, we ensured a smooth handoff process to our development team. This involved design walkthroughs, preparing design documentation, assets, and implementation guidelines within the design system. Thanks to our design review process, the development team had a wealth of product context and decisions made along the way, ensuring technical feasibility of each feature and alignment with the product roadmap and timeline.
Setting Up for the Future
We anticipated the need for expansion beyond the initial MVP iOS mobile application and began planning the development of an Android version, as well as a web-responsive cloud app. This involved initiating research on potential customers for each of these platforms, as well as assessing the ROI of expanding their product channels for post-MVP iterations.
With our design principles, product strategy, and design system, Sonic Age Inc. is already in a favorable position to scale their product while maintaining their "North Star" and unified language across platforms. This ensures continuity in providing value and upholding the mission of healing through frequencies and sound. This inspires not only our team but others as well, to constantly innovate and bring potential solutions that push the boundaries of what this mission can accomplish.
Results
Our design process culminated in a successful app launch that not only meets user needs but also provides a unique value that Vibeset can build upon to continue the growth of this product. The introduction of this app to the market positioned them as one of the only available options that deliver a high-quality, immersive sound bath experience.
With a 4.5-star rating in the Apple App Store and nearly 200 paid customers, Vibeset continues its journey and mission to lead the immersive sound bath experience and make it more accessible to users around the globe.
Reflection
Been able to contribute to the foundation and product vision of Vibeset and partening with multiple team across the globe has been a rewarding and incredible journey, making me reflect on the importante of sound in our lifes and how music and sound frequencies can help our mind state and reduce stress providing releaf and calm state to our innerselft.
Seeing the product evolve from just and idea and materilizing in product that can generetate a positive impact on peoples life is the best reward that any product desginer can have.
