Project: Bosebuild Sound
- Client: Bose Inc.
Platform: iOS iPhone & iPad
Bosebuild sound
Designing a mobile experience for a
hands-on speaker building kit
Bosebuild Sound was an educational mobile app designed to guide children through assembling a physical Bluetooth speaker while introducing foundational concepts of sound through interactive learning.
The experience needed to do more than teach build instructions. It had to keep younger users engaged through a multi-step process without becoming overwhelming, distracting, or overly instructional.
My role as a mobile product designer
I worked as part of a small team of designers, engineers, and client-side product owners on the end-to-end mobile experience. My contributions included UI/UX design, interaction patterns, instructional flows, and the visual design system. I also helped define motion that supported users through the physical speaker-building process.
The product challenge
The audience ranged from ages 8–14, with varied reading levels, attention spans, and learning preferences. Research provided by the client showed differences in how users engaged with instructional content, making it important to design an experience that could support a wide range of learning needs and behaviors.
As users progressed through the speaker build, the challenge extended beyond explaining each step. The experience needed to make a lengthy, multi-stage process feel approachable and playful without becoming distracting or overly instructional.
The challenge was finding the right balance between playful learning and structured guidance. Users needed to stay engaged, understand their progress, and feel that each step was moving them closer to a completed speaker.
The speaker build required extensive planning, documentation, and mapping before moving into
detailed design, including extensive task flows and a step-by-step guide.
Supporting progress through a multi-step build
It became clear that younger users didn’t just need instructions, they needed feedback that they were progressing correctly through the build.
With a long sequence of building steps, it could become difficult for users to keep track of their progress throughout the experience. Over time, the lack of clear progress cues made it difficult to understand how far along users were and what still remained.
The solution was to break the build into smaller, trackable milestones that gave structure to the overall process. By organizing the experience into distinct stages, users could more easily see how each step contributed to the final build. This was supported by:
• Creating a visual progression system to help users understand their position in the build
• Simplifying complex steps and designs into smaller, digestible actions
• Adding Milestones and achievement moments to reinforce progress
• Placing playful learning moments between build steps to act as step bookends
Each step was treated as its own moment in the process, making it feel like an
accomplishment and encouraging continued progress on the build.
Balancing visual and written instructions
Because the audience covered a wide range of reading abilities, instruction design needed to support different ways users engaged with the content.
Client provided testing showed that users did not all approach instructions in the same way, some relied more on visual cues, while others depended on written guidance to move through the build.
The challenge was ensuring that visual and written instructions worked together, so users could follow and complete each step in the way that made most sense to them. To do so, the designs:
• Combined instructions with illustrations to make each step easier to understand
• Structured steps to be understood through either visual or written guidance
- • Included repeating visual and written cues to reinforce actions throughout the build
Early concepts relied heavily on visuals, but client testing showed that written
guidance was equally important, challenging initial assumptions.
Playfulness with focus
The project needed to find the right level of playfulness to support engagement without overwhelming the experience.
Because the product was designed for children, the interface needed to feel engaging and inviting. Overly expressive visuals or excessive motion risked distracting from the instructional steps required to complete the build.
Early concepts explored busier textures, color, and more expressive motion. While these directions added personality, there was a concern that they could distract from the physical build process.
The final approach refined the visuals to be simple yet playful, introducing decorative and expressive elements only where they supported the copy. This helped maintain momentum through the build while keeping the experience approachable and easy to follow. To accomplish this:
• A simple, bright color palette defined the design system while keeping focus on the build
• Layouts utilized templates to create a consistent flow between steps
• Interactive elements were used as rewards after each step to encourage progression
Using a templated design system for each step (intro, build, confirmation, reward), users could
navigate the experience as a series of milestones rather than a single complex flow.
Extending the experience
The app needed to remain valuable after the speaker was completed. Without a clear reason to return, the experience risked ending once the physical build was finished.
To address this, the experience was designed to extend beyond the build itself, introducing features that supported ongoing exploration of learning concepts in everyday use. This helped encourage users to continue engaging with the app even after completing the initial build.
This approach transformed the product from a one-time instructional tool into an ongoing learning experience, encouraging users to return, revisit, and continue engaging with the content over time. This was achieved by:
• Designing content modules to be revisited for experimentation and discovery
• Adding a unique music player integrated with users music library
• Including a customizable light show based on the sound mix
After each build step, users were rewarded with an interactive sound-based module. These
were designed to be revisited after the build was complete to extend the experience.
The project outcome
Bosebuild Sound launched through Bose and retail partners, combining hands-on assembly with interactive learning to make technical concepts more approachable for younger audiences.
The product was recognized as a finalist in the 2017 UX Design Awards for its balance of education, usability, and play interactions.
Following launch, Bose continued investing in additional Bosebuild products and collaborated on new educational experiences.