dCS builds ultra-premium hi-fi equipment — the Bartók, the Vivaldi, the Lina. Products that start at several thousand pounds and climb well beyond that. The hardware was exceptional. The Mosaic app, which controls it all, wasn’t. For a customer who had spent years choosing their setup and tens of thousands of pounds building it, the software was a mismatch with everything else in the room. Versed Experience, a specialist design agency, brought me in as senior design lead to close that gap.
The problem wasn’t that the app was broken. It was designed to the wrong standard. When you spend £50,000 on a hi-fi system, every object in that room carries meaning. Then you pick up your phone and open an app that could have been built for any streaming device. A second layer: the hardware display — the physical screen on the dCS unit in the rack — and the app needed to feel like one coherent system. They didn’t.]
The north star: premium and simpler — both at once. The key creative decision was to simulate a three-dimensional space. Navigation was designed to suggest depth — layers, transitions, a sense of moving through space rather than switching between screens. The visual direction moved toward abstraction, emphasising emotion over technical detail. Audiophiles don’t want to feel like they’re managing software. They want to feel the music.
Deliverables: information architecture, UX flows (multilevel 3D navigation), immersive onboarding, simplified volume management gestures, full UI screens (mobile and tablet), design system, bespoke icon system, hardware display UI, prototypes validated before handover.
The full design was delivered implementation-ready and handed over to dCS’s internal engineering team. Every screen, every flow, every component documented and specified. The handoff had to stand on its own — no ongoing design support planned. The principles from this engagement — elevation over ornamentation, emotion over technical detail, coherence across surfaces — apply to every complex product since. When the product carries prestige, the software has to earn it.
