Why Audio Brands need Designers
In most engineering-driven audio companies, technical excellence often overshadows user experience, resulting in acoustically impressive products that lack UX quality. By integrating a designers into your development process, you bridge the gap between engineering capabilities and market success. This article outlines how designers transform audio innovation teams through visualization, convention-breaking, and rapid prototyping—ultimately leading to products that excel both technically and commercially.
The Missing Voice in Audio Product Development
Last year, I worked with a premium headphone manufacturer who had developed what their engineering team considered a breakthrough in noise-cancellation technology. The DSP algorithm was genuinely revolutionary—reducing ambient noise by an additional 4dB compared to market leaders. The team invested 18 months in perfecting the technology, only to discover during late-stage user testing that their implementation required an unintuitive series of button presses to activate different modes, and the physical design sacrificed comfort for technical performance.
This scenario plays out repeatedly across the many projects I was a part of. Companies with exceptional engineering talent create technically superior products that fail to resonate with users because the human experience was considered too late in the process.
The root cause is often structural: audio companies traditionally organize around technical domains (acoustic engineering, DSP, electrical engineering, manufacturing) rather than user-centred workflows. The consequence is products that excel in measurement but disappoint in use—resulting in weaker market performance, customer returns, and frustrated innovation teams.
The Designer as Translation Layer: A Framework for Integration
The solution isn't simply hiring designers but integrating design thinking as a methodology throughout your product development process. We've developed the TUNE framework (Translate, Unify, Navigate, and Evaluate) to help audio organizations bridge the gap between engineering excellence and user satisfaction.
At its core, this approach positions designers not as decorators who make products aesthetically pleasing, but as facilitators who translate between technical capabilities and human needs. They create a "translation layer" between what's technically possible and what's experientially desirable.
Think of it like an audio mixer: engineers provide the raw tracks (technologies, features, capabilities), while designers adjust levels, add effects, and balance elements to create a cohesive experience that resonates with listeners. Neither could succeed alone, but together they create something exceptional.
This approach works because it respects both engineering and design disciplines while establishing clear interfaces between them. It acknowledges the physics and technical constraints of audio products while elevating the importance of the listening experience.
Breaking Down the TUNE Framework
Translate
Designers make the abstract tangible. In audio product development, concepts often exist only in specification documents or engineering diagrams. Designers translate these into visual representations, prototypes, and experiential models that everyone can understand.
When developing a smart speaker, our design team created simple cardboard form factors with annotated interface elements long before engineering finalized the acoustic architecture. This allowed everyone—from acoustic engineers to marketing executives—to share a common vision and language about the product.
Unify
While engineers necessarily focus on discrete components (drivers, amplifiers, DSP), designers maintain a holistic view of the product experience. They help teams overcome silos by:
Creating journey maps that show how users interact with products over time
Developing personas that humanize target users beyond demographic data
Facilitating cross-functional workshops that align technical and experiential goals
Maintaining visual systems that ensure consistency across touchpoints
Navigate
Designers excel at breaking conventions constructively. The transition from wired to wireless earbuds wasn't just a technical challenge—it required reimagining how users interact with audio products. Designers help navigation innovation by:
Questioning established interaction patterns
Proposing alternative approaches to technical challenges
Visualizing future scenarios that push beyond current limitations
Creating safe spaces for radical thinking early in the development process
Evaluate
Perhaps most critically, designers help teams test ideas before significant investment. For an audio conferencing system, our designers created interactive prototypes that simulated complex beam forming microphone arrays without requiring full hardware development. This allowed testing of different control interfaces with users months before technical implementation began.
Putting TUNE into Practice
To implement this approach in your organization:
Begin by inviting designers into technical discussions earlier. Instead of waiting until specifications are finalized, include them in the definition phase when requirements are still flexible.
Ask your team these questions:
What assumptions are we making about how users will interact with this feature (TRANSLATE)?
How do we ensure the user experience is consistent and holistic across the user journey (UNIFY)?
How are you challenging existing conventions and practice thinking-out-of-the-box (NAVIGATE)?
How are we evaluating and verifying concepts and solutions (EVALUATE)?
Start small by creating a simple visualization exercise: when discussing new features, have someone sketch concepts in real-time during meetings. This alone can reveal misalignments in understanding and spark better collaboration.
The Outcomes: Better Products, Faster Development
Teams that integrate designers using the TUNE framework consistently report:
Reduced development cycles due to earlier identification of usability challenges
Higher user satisfaction scores, even with technically equivalent products
More efficient resource allocation by validating concepts before engineering investment
Stronger market differentiation through experiences that competitors can't easily replicate
Improved team collaboration and communication across disciplines
One audio brand we worked with reduced development time by 30% while improving user satisfaction scores by implementing these approaches. More importantly, their engineering teams reported greater satisfaction with the final products—seeing their technical innovations properly showcased through intuitive user experiences.
Merging Technical Excellence and User Experience
The most successful audio products of the last decade haven't necessarily been those with the best technical specifications. They've been products that balanced technical excellence with exceptional user experiences—from Apple's AirPods to Røde’s audio-mixers.
If your organization is engineering-led, introducing design thinking through the TUNE framework doesn't diminish technical excellence—it amplifies it by ensuring that brilliant engineering innovations translate into meaningful user benefits.
Consider how your next audio product development might change if designers were involved from day one. What conversations would shift? What assumptions might be challenged earlier? How might your roadmap look different?
True innovation in audio requires both engineering precision and design intuition—an orchestra rather than soloists. The question isn't whether you need designers, but how effectively you're integrating their unique capabilities into your innovation process.
About the Author
Iwan, and his team at Notation have over a decade of expereince in bridging the worlds of acoustic engineering and user experience design. We help audio brands on their pursuit of perfect sound with our industrial design, user experience design and user interface design services. Our methodology has helped develop award-winning headphones, smart speakers, and conferencing systems that excel both technically and experientially.