Harman
Harman
Enhancing Audio Software with an Android App
The challenge
Harman is a Samsung company that owns and operates some of the world’s most legendary audio brands, including Harman Kardon, JBL, Infinity, and Lexicon. Within this 26,000-employee global conglomerate is the Harman Embedded Audio team, a team of the world’s best audio engineers that creates hardware and software audio solutions for consumer electronics, IoT, and other audio-enabled devices.
Harman hired CitrusBits to build an Android-based demo app for the Harman Embedded Audio Team’s new audio-enhancing software, AudioEFX. The demo app needed to showcase the substantial audio enhancements AudioEFX provides relative to normal audio. The app also needed to demonstrate Audio EFX’s superior audio performance in three distinct listening scenarios.
The Harman team had considered numerous other app development agencies across the US for this project, but they ultimately felt the most confident in CitrusBits’ ability to deliver a bug-free app on time, with the powerful user experience necessary to make a sales impact.
The process
In approaching the app’s UX/UI design, we knew we had to make the app easy to use for prospective customers who might only have a minute or two to spend with the app — i.e., at an industry trade show, for example. This led us to design intuitive, swipe-based navigation to enable users to move between listening scenarios.
Within each listening scenario, users can begin playing a sample audio file with normal audio settings. Once the audio begins to play, users can press a button to toggle on the AudioEFX-enhanced audio. The button can then be toggled back and forth, allowing users to experience substantial contrasts in audio quality and detail.
We knew the enhanced audio would itself impress users, offering a substantially clearer and more dynamic listening experience than the normal audio. Yet, we knew that we had to design an enhanced visual experience to complement that audio experience. So, we added a number of eye-grabbing visual elements to both make it obvious that the audio had been toggled from “normal” to “enhanced,” as well as to make it clear that the enhanced audio was substantially more dynamic and interesting.
The result
Our user-centric design and crystal-clear grasp of the project allowed us to deliver a simple-to-use and bug-free demo app ahead of our deadline, providing the multisensory “wow” factor our client was after:
The project was a great success and received highly positive customer feedback. Harman Embedded Audio Team also used the app with a potential customer, potentially generating a sale — thus not only demonstrating their world-class audio product but also generating revenue.
