Inside UX at Beats by Dre: Design for humans, hardware and hype

I started working for Beats in London in 2013 as a Vendor, then joined as a Principal UX designer on the newly formed Product Experience team post-Apple acquisition. At its core, the team consisted of UX, CMF (Color, Material, and Finish) and Packaging Designers, as well as Product Managers, Researchers, UX writers and Film Makers - as well as other temporary partners.

Our goal was strategic change in the business and ultimately the best possible product-market fit. We took an outside-in approach to user insights, traveling to key target markets around the world and speaking to people in their homes to understand not only the role music played in people’s lives, but the deeper emotional layer which is still difficult to achieve today with AI tools. We distilled our findings into user outcomes on both a city and a global level with the help of key stakeholders in the business and formed a five-year strategy for Beats products.

As a team we all had our own responsibilities — I was DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) on the Beats App for Android, as well as iOS software integrations, and then also contributed to physical product UX design — but in our work on this common set of principles and personas we found that the lines blurred between disciplines.

Experience over everything

How can you take your customers on a wonderful journey with your brand holding their hand all the way? People only want a specific set of needs to catered for in a way that aligns with their values.

Create simple human interactions

Design experiences that feel natural and intuitive — grounded in familiar behaviors, clear feedback, and minimal friction. Every interaction should serve a purpose, reduce complexity, and connect seamlessly to how people already think, feel, and move.

Surround yourself with great people

People are at the core of everything we do, including how we create these physical and digital things. Some people energize your work, others are toxic towards it. Bring the energy.

Keep Going

Design is a complex and messy beast. Do your job well, and you’ll end up with a beautiful and inevitable-feeling ‘thing’ at the end, which everyone can eloquently post-rationalize. The hard work before that is often a messy and meandering path. Have the confidence that you’ll get there if you keep going.

Express your culture

Be a champion of your brand, design with your head and your heart. I think Jessica Walsh said “Find your weird” — I like that, if you can approach small details with care and humility you will improve the quality of your work exponentially.

Aesthetic and Functional consistency

Use consistent copy, visual elements, movement, color, and design systems to blur lines between worlds. ​​An experience should be simple in purpose, beautiful in execution, and true to the values of its brand.

Informed Compromise

You’ll always come up against something eroding your design nirvana, but know what you can compromise on and what is sacred. Have a clear go-to-market strategy of what you can launch with; if you’re not meeting it, don’t launch. If you do compromise on something, it’s up to you to keep it on the roadmap for the future, so it doesn’t fall by the wayside.

Get out into the REAL world

Take your thinking outside. Chat to someone in a coffee shop. Run in the rain. Look inquisitively at the details on a building. Hold a loved one’s hand. Find a weird object in the street. Catch a movie. Smell a jasmine flower. Take a hike and observe some ants. Go to the beach and film a pelican. Read some pamphlets.

Designing the Beats App for Android was a constant exercise in adaptability. Unlike iOS, Android is fragmented — with multiple OS versions and unpredictable system updates that can disrupt core parts of your product experience. At one point, we built a responsive “connect” notification (similar to Fast Pair today) that relied on displaying content over other apps — until Android policies changed, forcing us to rethink how users accessed the app entirely.

These seemingly small shifts can have a huge impact. In any connected ecosystem, you’re constantly balancing complex backend logic with a consistent, seamless user experience across products. A firmware update on one device might require trade-offs elsewhere, and even enabling a simple user-facing setting can demand a full QA cycle or significant engineering effort.

As a UX designer in this space, you quickly learn to pick your battles. You have to recognize when a trade-off is worth it — and when to stand your ground. These decisions aren’t made in isolation, and you must be ready to defend your decisions, as all eyes will be on you.

Touch is no longer just an input — it’s a non-verbal language for interacting with technology. From clicking a button to pinching a headphone stem, intuitive touch makes complex systems feel simple and human.

In physical design, the goal is to make actions feel obvious — guided by form, materials, and tactile feedback. In software, we have more flexibility: gestures and micro-interactions can adapt to users’ needs, support accessibility, and respond to context. We can also surface actions dynamically and provide clearer feedback when something goes wrong — a luxury hardware alone can’t offer.

Where the two converge, we see innovation like the MacBook trackpad. Try clicking it when powered off — you can’t. What feels like a mechanical hinge is the Taptic Engine simulating a click, enabling programmable, contextual feedback.

When touch is intuitive, design disappears — and what’s left is an experience that feels right.

Digital design has long drawn inspiration from the physical world. Skeuomorphism helped early interfaces feel familiar — ebooks were leather-textured, calendars looked like paper, buttons mimicked plastic, and the mouse wheel paved the way for today’s doomscrolling. These cues grounded people in an unfamiliar digital landscape and ultimately paved the way for many of the digital behaviors we see today, even friction and gravity factored to make interactions feel more human-like.

But now, the influence is reversing. Digital has begun to reshape our expectations of the physical. We expect the physical world to match the responsiveness, customization, and immediacy we’ve grown used to in our digital lives, and accessible tools like 3D printing, open-source software, and free libraries of products empower people to take design into their own hands.

Products are expected to adapt, to feel personal, and to anticipate us — not just functionally, but emotionally. The physical now has to work harder to keep up.

In building a 0–1 product like a new pair of headphones, we approached the process through an experience-first lens.

Before downstream teams could begin their work, we focused on defining and scoping the key experience features — identifying the interaction moments that would shape how users engage with the product end-to-end. This often meant developing detailed experience documents that aligned cross-functionally with Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Software (SWE), and Hardware Engineering (HWE), ensuring technical feasibility while preserving design intent.

Once the core interaction layers were defined — such as gestures, button logic, or haptics — we collaborated with Human Factors and Industrial Design to refine the physical interface: button layout, force thresholds, ergonomics, and overall affordance.

As hardware matured through different builds, we rigorously tested and validated every interaction, using real-world scenarios to ensure the experience held up under use. We fed findings and edge cases back into the process continuously with SQA and HWQA, collaborating across teams to refine and improve, always with the user experience at the center.

Don’t think in terms of physical and digital — think of the overall product experience, the entire relationship of user and product, from pre-purchase, through first use, and how it unfolds over time. People don’t care about physical, digital, or even features — they care about a frictionless solution to their needs.

What are the business goals for your product? What is your overall business strategy for the next few years? What capabilities do you have in your wider team? — If you want to release one physical product to span the next ten years, keep features restricted to core functions. If you want to launch a new one each year, you can make more assumptions and add more “selling point” features, but always be open to learn from your mistakes.

Only build an app if there is a genuine need for one. Make sure it has a seamless brand touchpoint — double down on the brand experience and emotion, and make sure you give people a good reason to keep using it. You’re on the hook for keeping it working seamlessly.

Implement robust data analytics to track user interactions and product usage. You can gain a lot of understanding of your users’ behaviors, and potentially identify new ones. Feed this information back into your pipeline to improve your understanding of the ideal product experience and react to trends bubbling up. Offer personalized recommendations and give dedicated support for any issues that users may be having.

Bring in other teams at the right time — share your macro-level view of the experience and give them the freedom to interpret it. Help out teams daily on a micro level to unblock them and keep an open mind to inevitable trade-offs.

Oh, and don’t forget the emotion. This is for humans, not robots.

In the mid-90s, my dad drove a Saab 9-5 with a “night panel” button—a humble piece of design genius. Tap it, and the dashboard went dark, leaving only the essentials: speed, fuel, and a quiet sense of focus. It wasn’t about minimalism for the sake of aesthetics—it was about intentionality, about keeping attention on the road and letting me and my brother sleep in the back seat.

Today, we have more to show than ever: more screens, more data, more features. But the future of interface design isn’t about adding—it’s about carefully determining what not to show. Clarity is becoming a luxury. Smart, adaptive systems bring only what matters to the surface when it matters.

AI is changing how we design—but more importantly, it’s changing what it means to be a designer. As AI takes care of what designers used to do—accelerating layout, copy, asset creation, and prototyping, our value is moving upstream: into setting vision, establishing principles, and shaping the systems that guide the machines.