Role
Stretegy & Design Direction

Project Deliverables
Design Strategy
Design Specification
Digital Prototypes
Design System
Design Research

Year
2016 - 2020

Key Metrics
↳ 6M downloads
↳ Reduced support calls by 35%

Design Problem

As Bluetooth stacks on phones, tablets, and laptops evolved rapidly, thousands of Beats customers were left with devices that felt like they were falling behind — refusing to connect, glitching out, or suddenly not powering on. While Apple’s support lines were flooded with “connection” and “can’t power on” complaints, Beats needed a reliable and intuitive way to deliver firmware updates, device diagnostics, and battery health tools to users — without friction, downloads, or tech-speak.

Challenges

The diversity of Beats hardware — from Studio to Powerbeats to Solo — made for a serious design challenge. Devices ran on different chipsets, supported different firmware protocols, and came from various product generations. Many legacy products were no longer officially supported but still in heavy rotation by users.

Solution

We built Beats Updater as a dynamic, Mac and Windows app underpinned by a browser-based tool that paired instantly with any supported Beats product and reflected the real-life appearance of each user’s device lineup — their full Beats “quiver.” The experience was highly visual, intuitive, and delightfully low-friction. Core features were firmware updates, device renaming, battery status, and product legitimacy verification.

“Support call volume dropped almost overnight after launch. We finally had a tool to point users to that actually resolved issues without handholding.”

— AppleCare Technical Support Liaison

Results

The Beats Updater was downloaded over 6 million times, and was instrumental in decreasing Apple support calls referencing connection and power issues by 35%. It was adopted as a “legit checker” to identify authentic Beats products and also became an essential internal tool for Beats engineering. Overall it strengthened user confidence in product longevity, even for legacy devices. Beats Updater was superseded in 2020 by iOS OTA updates, and the Beats App for Android.