Bang & Olufsen BeoSound 5

The Bang & Olufsen BeoSound 5 is a digital music player with an innovative interface to give customers a unique music browsing experience. We wanted the BeoSound 5 to be an exceptional digital music player, where the experience of navigating through – and enjoying listening to – huge collections of music was the main design objective. Using three aluminum wheels for scrolling, changing views and adjusting volume, it offers a very distinct experience.

In this project, concept development and experience prototyping were done concurrently in a very iterative design process. Each week new versions were created to integrate and test new or improved features. The functional interactive prototypes we developed were used for defining and evaluating interaction ideas and product concepts – as well as for communicating and presenting these ideas.

During concept and prototype development, sketches were made to design the user experience, and features were coded so they could be evaluated in a working prototype. The prototype was used as the office jukebox and in this way enabled others to try out the functionality and offer feedback as well as proposals for improvements and new features.