After working at two startups, my curiosity about larger companies' design approaches led me to join Shure as a UX design intern on their general design team, where I worked on everything from design system maintenance to product redesigns.

As a musician and an avid user of Shure's microphones, I was fascinated by Shure's focus on audio. I was lucky to have amazing supervisors, who allowed me to go beyond the scope of my assigned task and explore my areas of interest, in the form of various smaller projects. Overall, this internship was a perfect introduction to audio-specific UX design, blending my passions for design and music.

In this case study, I discuss two of the projects I worked on:

Prism 2 (Shure's previous design system) lacked several audio-specific components, and needed a revamp. Designers had several requests for missing components, and had to create them on the go, often losing up to 20-30% of design time on manual adjustments.

I added 15 new components to Prism 3, tailored to designers' needs, with enhanced customization through variants and instance swaps. All were approved for publishing.

One of the components I created was a segmented control, which appeared in Prism 2 as a tabs component.

I explored the ways in which segmented controls were used in other products, to create a new and improved component.

To design components like audio meters and gain faders, I needed a deeper understanding of details like peak-indicator animation and decibel scales. I interviewed 3 designers who worked on relevant software to gain insights into their use of these components.

Even with lower-level components like segmented control, we tried to stay inspired by other components. For example, the design is highly influenced by the default and disabled state of standard buttons.

The goal was to reduce the need for manual adjustments. With the most common design scenario being vertical and horizontal channel strips, I began by creating vertical and horizontal scales.

By the end of the internship, I created over 15 components, which were approved for publishing.

Although there is no concrete data on the time saved by designers using the new components, many of them—including the icon buttons, standard buttons, layouts, text inputs, the two-option segmented control I advocated for, and more—were included in Designer 6, released in February 2024.

I learned a lot about specific Figma functions and components, from instance swaps, to nested instances, and more. I also got to learn about the format and organization of design systems, especially in the context of larger companies. This helped me understand how to utilize design systems in my designs correctly moving forward.

The main challenge was navigating the learning curve of Shure's organization of Prism 2 and my initial inexperience with Figma's component functionalities. I owe a huge thank you to my supervisors, Christina and Anna, who were always available to answer my questions.

For inexperienced users, the current success rate of the error handling process is 30%. I was tasked with creating a more intuitive error-handling workflow.

Providing users with tailored interfaces based on their experience with audio equipment, minimizing on-screen information to essentials, and automating error handling as much as possible.

To learn about the issues users had with the software, I watched 3 product walkthroughs with inexperienced users, and used afinity diagraming to identify the main pain points.

Shure already had existing wireframes of desktop beginner error handling flows which I was tasked with improving, while keeping the following user scenario in mind.

Instead of each card representing multiple devices, the new card represents a single device, with a red border, showing an error. I replaced the red checkmark with an "error" icon for clarity.

Users simply needed to see the malfunctioning devices. Thus, I hid information such as location-based optimization, and the wireless spectrum forecast. I also moved the 'getting started' section down in the hierarchy, since it is not relevant when the user is in a crisis.

I made sure to showcase all of the individual devices, and provide more visibility regarding their amount. I made the sections collapsable, with functioning devices not showing by default.

I proposed giving users clear visual steps when it comes to handling different errors. The instructions should be simple enough to follow without understanding the error types, and will appear as popups once a user clicks on a CTA.

Bellow are the screens in order.

This project taught me that simplicity wins, especially in stressful situations. The main thing that helped me with creating the home screen was taking the users' mental state into account, and prioritizing their main concern - identifying which devices are malfunctioning, and taking the first step to fix them.

The main challenge was leaving my own bias and knowledge regarding audio and microphones behind, and "pretending" to be a complete beginner when designing.