Project Alfred
A cross-functional initiative to define the strategic vision, UX architecture, and design language for a fully connected Bose ecosystem. Below is a sample of artifacts that represents the goals, scope, and high level outcomes from the work.
Team — Bose & Fjord
Duration — Aug – Nov 2016
My Role — UX & Interaction Design Lead
Contributed to UX architecture across multiple service area work streams, developing interaction patterns and flow logic that connected disparate system components
Collaborated with Fjord team on experience principles and positioning, helping translate strategic intent into concrete design decisions
Most companies design products. Alfred was an attempt to design an entire world.
Bose partnered with Fjord to ask a question that doesn't get asked often enough: what if every product we make got better because of every other product we make? Alfred was the answer — a cross-functional initiative to define the strategic vision, UX architecture, and design language for a fully connected Bose ecosystem.
The goal wasn't an app update. It was a reframe of what Bose could mean to a person's life.
Alfred Positioning —Content, family and friends. Intimately connected.
Deliver astonishing content and communication experiences that create intimate connections (Nearness), bring Bose experiences to life faster (Immediacy) and maintain seamless execution even when contexts shift (Continuity).
How it happened —
40 Designers.
4 Months.
One Vision.
A group of 40 designers and strategists from Bose and Fjord joined forces, co-located across New York and Framingham, MA. Built on a Make Shop model, the team worked across three phases — converging, generating, and committing — to design the future of Bose.
We asked ourselves, Where does Bose own the experience — and where does it simply enable?
Using a Me/We/Us focus framework and a 1/1+/Many device category matrix, the team developed 5 service areas that framed Bose's experiential future. Each was supported by key cases, capability storyboards, and feasibility assessments.
Seamless Connections
Your Bose ID travels with you. The system knows your location, your devices, your household, your contacts — handling the logistics of pairing and routing so you never have to think about which speaker is in which room.
Service Areas
The 5 human-centered avenues through which Bose’s future experiences will be deployed and evolved over time.
Being Available Together, Smart Content and Defining Moments are prioritized to be launched first.
Focus Areas
Smart Content
The system learns your listening and viewing patterns across Spotify, Pandora, Netflix — surfacing recommendations and flagging what the people closest to you are consuming right now. The idea that your dad's playlist could pull you back into a shared ritual you'd let slip was the emotional core.
In Conclusion
Alfred didn't ship wholesale — that was never the expectation. But the themes it surfaced didn't evaporate when the engagement ended. They traveled back with the people who'd spent four months living inside the vision. The connected app experience, the ecosystem lens, the habit of asking how a product behaves as part of something larger rather than on its own — these became harder to ignore in the conversations that followed. Service design thinking took root. Priorities shifted. That's what this kind of work is for: not to be implemented in full, but to raise the floor of what a team believes is possible.
Experience Storyboards
A Peek into the (speculative) Future
The Design Concept is an attempt to envision a Bose product launch from the future — written and designed as if it had already launched, and the ecosystem had already shipped. Instead of hedging with conditionals, the team had to commit. What does the app actually look like? What does it feel like to get a notification from your Bose system on a Tuesday morning?
Just Enjoy
The system captures recurring moments — a Sunday yoga session, a nightly dinner playlist — and learns to anticipate them. It takes the configuration work off the table so the experience can be fully ambient.
Shared Experiences
Bose as a social layer. Not a social network, but a thin, intentional presence layer built on top of the content you already love. Who's listening. What they're listening to. Whether they're available. A join button.
