BBC Sounds on Sonos
Designing a full, personalised BBC Sounds experience for Sonos users.
Please note: This case study covers a pre-2024 version of the Sonos app.
For confidentiality, it shares the context of the project and a high-level account of the decisions taken. All views are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of the BBC.
We want BBC Sounds to be available wherever and whenever people want to listen, and this is another way to make sure people can enjoy our audio however they choose.
THE BBC VISION
Sounds Everywhere
BBC Sounds is the BBC's service for audio content: live radio, music mixes and award-winning podcasts, all in one place.
Its product strategy, Sounds Everywhere, is about making the full catalogue reachable from any device, wherever people are listening.
By 2021 Sounds had an average weekly audience of 3.6 million across mobile, TV, web and voice-activated devices. Sonos speakers, in nearly 1.4 million UK households, were the gap.
In December 2021 we launched the BBC Sounds service for the Sonos app, bringing the full Sounds experience to every Sonos speaker in the UK.
THE PROBLEM
We were missing out on something
Until launch, Sonos users could only reach BBC content through third-party apps. No sign-in. No personalisation. No control over branding, attribution or onward journeys.
The BBC was ceding the relationship with a large, premium audience to platforms it didn't own.
THE SOLUTION
Bringing the Sonos audience in-house
Sign-in. Personalisation. Brand control. Onward journeys back to the BBC. A custom service inside the Sonos app would provide all of it.
A win for users (a coherent experience across platforms) and for the BBC (reach, data, brand).
MY ROLE
Design Lead and Information Architect
I led the project from a UX perspective — owning every design decision, managing mid-level designers, and getting hands-on with key visual work myself.
The headline piece was the Information Architecture: mapping BBC Sounds onto Sonos's template system without losing the feel of the BBC Sounds app. Around that I owned hi-fi mockups, user flows, branding assets, custom iconography, UX copy and supported the dev and product teams throughout.
The service shipped in the UK in early December 2021.
Huge shout out to Simone Ferraro who had the complex task of mapping the Sounds IA to the Sonos architecture and templates. Balancing creativity and pragmatism was key to this project and Simone nailed it.
THE CHALLENGES
Balancing Creativity and Pragmatism
Four things made this challenging:
- Cross-team alignment. Product, architecture, the BBC Account team, and an external dev house. Each with different priorities and timelines.
- Re-mapping the BBC Sounds IA to Sonos's template system. The existing structure couldn't be transferred as-is. Re-thinking it from the ground up was the essence of the work.
- Matching the standard of the BBC Sounds app. The audience would compare it to the standalone Sounds app from day one. Interactions, branding, and copy all had to match.
- A pre-Christmas deadline. Launch was set for December 2021. Non-negotiable, like it or not.
ACTION
Re-mapping the IA
Sonos pulls third-party content through its own template system, using the data exposed via the existing BBC Sounds APIs. That system defines how information is gathered, structured, and displayed.
The biggest constraint sat right there.
BBC Sounds is organised around four sections: Home, Music, Podcasts and My Stuff, all sitting on a moderately deep hierarchy.
None of that could come over as-is on Sonos: it doesn't give third-party services a top-level navigation menu, and its templates can't render that depth.
I redesigned the structure from the ground up: same content, fewer levels, fewer detours.
Forcing the existing Information Architecture through Sonos's templates was not feasible.
Yet that structure was exactly what the audience was comfortable with: moving from the BBC Sounds app to Sonos, they'd still expect direct routes into Music, Podcasts and personalised content.
The answer was to flatten the hierarchy.
I redesigned the structure from the ground up: same content, fewer levels, fewer detours.
With the structure flattened, the titles of the homepage rails could double as access points to the main sections, emulating a top-level navigation.
From there, the audience could go as deep into the catalogue as they wanted without getting lost.
Flattening the IA was a significant departure from the structure of the BBC Sounds app.
I needed the new structure to be tangible enough to be sold easily to senior stakeholders and unlock sign-off.
To make the case, I produced with the team high-fidelity screens in the Sonos look and feel and linked them into a prototype that walked the IA end to end.
The same artefacts then became the working reference for the development and product teams through every phase of build.
ACTION
Aligning with the brand
The service had to live inside the Sonos app while remaining definitely BBC. Just porting the BBC Sounds branding assets onto the Sonos app wasn't an option. Every asset needed reworking to fit the Sonos context without losing what makes BBC Sounds recognisable.
My contributions:
- Producing brand assets to Sonos specs while keeping the BBC identity intact
- Designing the custom iconography
- Writing UX copy: titles, error states, descriptions
- Optimising imagery within the API's constraints
ACTION
Sign-in on Sonos
BBC Sounds is a signed-in service.
Sign-in allows BBC Sounds to serve personalised content: without it, the product loses one of its core strengths.
Surfacing content that is relevant to each user is central to the BBC Sounds experience on Sonos.
Working closely with the BBC Account team, I followed the sign-in flow through its iterations: from an initial browser-based sign-in to a full app-to-app account linking flow.
IMPACT
A positive impact on reach, brand presence, and overall experience
The service launched in the UK in early December 2021.
BBC Sounds’ brand presence on Sonos grew, and users gained a more coherent experience.
A signed-in experience on a third-party platform gave the BBC important insights and analytics that would otherwise have been missed.
Tracking users across their Sonos journey delivered both business benefits and a better user experience, through improved recommendations and an increased level of personalisation.
The impact was measured in:
- Reach increase
- Increase in time spent listening
- U35 Reach
- Time spent listening to on-demand content
- Frequency
The reach of BBC Sounds on Sonos overtook the BBC Sounds TV app within three weeks of launch.
Three months after launch, Sounds’ average weekly audience reached 4.5 million, with 10% coming from Sonos.
In October 2022, the increase in consumption hours was largely down to Sonos.
This has been a brilliant multi-team effort from all the teams involved. We're all really excited to see the service live and really pleased to be bringing an excellent Sounds experience to new and existing BBC audiences on the Sonos platform.
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