Is the Sonos Move well designed? A UX review

The Sonos Move is an impressive portable speaker from its spec sheet, to its size, to its price, to its many capabilities. But is it well designed?

Let’s find out together.

All of my reviews use the Design Critique Rubric and the Guidelines for Thoughtful Product Design. Any review without a rubric is just kind of a random person’s opinion.

I’m also a professor at the University of Maryland in user-centered design and human-computer interaction. I am constantly critiquing the design of products for lessons for my students, and I want to bring those lessons here.

Affordances and signifiers

Sonos really harnesses affordances well with the Move. What are affordances? Read up.

You can play music and control the Move with the Sonos app (on touchscreen and desktop devices), with voice, or with controls on the speakers themselves. This is nailing all of the affordances that a user would want in 2019.

I know that some people are wary of voice assistance, but voice is a great control mechanism, particularly for music, and it has some big accessibility implications.

Sonos even built in a handle on the Move to make it easy to move around and to encourage you to move the Move all over…