Oppo:
Designing Sounds For A New “Aquamorphic” Operating System
Overall Skills
Sound Design
Figma was utilized as the tool and platform for the redesign, utilizing prototyping tools and more.
Project Management
Analyzing the existing user experience and altering it by creating a new user interface that highlights consistency and playfulness.
Collaboration Facilitation
Creation of UI/UX sounds to support the feeling of feedback throughout the application.
Aquamorphism
During my time as Sonic Minds, I had to opportunity to work with Oppo and their new operating system Color OS 14. In a collaboration with Epic Sound, we were tasked with creating UI/UX sounds for their new design direction, which they called “Aquamorphism 2.0”.
Aquamorphism 2.0 represented a clear vision for how they wanted they products to feel and be represented. This vision was based upon the movement and effects of water, its ability to move flowingly, adapt intelligently and be nourishing to the human mind, body and spirit.
My role in the project was to assist with sound production, manage the project and help facilitate collaboration between the Danish culture and the Chinese culture.
Culture and Meaning
Designing The Sounds
From these descriptors we designing sounds that were subtle, pleasant and minimal whilst still having an evocative effect on the users.
For the shorter UI sounds, water droplets were used as an inspiration…
One of the hardest elements of working across cultures and languages is aligning expectation and understanding how meaning arises differently from certain words, visual elements, sounds and so on.
Therefore, to start off the project, we conducted a handful of workshops in order to understand Oppo, the meaning they gathered from certain words, and how they responded to certain types of sound. From this, we aligned on three overall descriptors: Alive, Intelligent Dynamics and Elegant/Enriching.
These descriptors formed the baseline from which we created the UI sounds and from which we could facilitate cross-cultural understanding as our understanding of these descriptors were the same.
Sound Design
To complement the creative visual design of Google Photos, as well as the interactions, UI sounds were created to support the user journey throughout the app.
To support feedback and interaction, the sounds were created to be very simple and short, as to not overburden the user with sound. However, the sounds also needed to have a bit of personality to match the creativity of taking photographs. Therefore, the baseline sounds consist of short clicks to give a solid feeling of feedback, with a bit of tone added into the mix to give the sounds some personality and playfulness.
Melodies were created with this baseline sound to support the changing of layouts in the settings menu, by matching the melodies to the feeling of the layouts and giving a more playful feeling.
Additional swooshes were added when changing pictures to heighten the feeling of playfulness as well.
See the video below for the full visual and auditory redesign of Google Photos.