Home users
Music lovers who listen for pleasure and want to hear music exactly as it was intended. They're looking to get the most out of their listening space, but also expect convenience and comfort.
Smart speaker control app
for Dutch & Dutch
Dutch & Dutch make award-winning loudspeakers. Facts. Using a combination of hardware and software, the speakers fully adapt to the listener's room. I'm helping to overhaul the app that lets customers configure, calibrate, and control every part of their listening experience.
New hardware + design debt + platform plans = full redesign
Dutch & Dutch were getting ready to launch the 6c: a smaller, new and improved version of their initial 8c model. New hardware required new software, the existing app had accrued design debt, and there was a platform play in the works. A redo started to sound increasingly appealing.
When I joined the project, the ask was two-fold: help us reimagine the software as a platform from the ground up, and help all users get the absolute most out of their speakers.
The audience
Dutch & Dutch speakers attract two distinct audiences. Both care deeply about sound quality and are willing to invest in it, but they show up with different needs and expectations.
Studio users
Power users who make music for a living. They rely on the speakers as a professional tool; they might spend all day in a studio. Comfortable diving into calibration, routing, and fine-grained control.
Control every aspect
Typical active loudspeakers will have limited controls to adjust the speaker's output. Some do this with physical switches, other brands offer apps.
Dutch & Dutch go pretty far with this. The app lets users control gain, mute, sleep, input source, phase mode, EQ. But that's just the start. Users can enter the dimensions of their room, the position of the speakers in the room, and the position of the listener within the room. Based on those measurements, the speakers adjust their output to achieve optimal sound quality.
And then to take things even further, it's possible to calibrate the speakers by recording a series of frequency sweeps, analyzing the response, and generating a set of EQ filters to flatten the room response curve.
The most important control
But before we tame the room, we need to control the volume. So that's where I started.