SHURE · 2015 — 2018
Microflex Complete Wireless
A 4-surface conferencing system for spaces from boardrooms to parliaments
Won Best of Show at Integrated Systems Europe 2018, the largest AV trade show in Europe. Shipped across hardware, touchscreen, and web. Used today in government chambers across Europe and board rooms/institutions around the world.
What we were building
Shure entered the discussion and information systems market in 2011 by acquiring a Danish conferencing company. By 2015 the inherited product had been outdated for years, sales were stalling, and corporate customers — parliaments, universities, corporate town halls — were defecting to competitors.
I joined as UX designer for what became Microflex Complete Wireless: a wireless conferencing system designed to replace the legacy product across four connected interfaces.
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An admin web app
for the IT or AV technician who installs, configures, and monitors the system
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A charger status display
for tracking which microphone units are charged and ready
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A touchscreen on the microphone unit
for the meeting chairman, who controls voting, agenda, and speaker order
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A different touchscreen UI on the same unit
for delegates, who participate in the conference
The same hardware had to serve a 5-person executive meeting and a 500-seat parliament. The same admin web app had to support a single AV technician at a corporate event and a full IT department managing a national legislature.
The four surfaces of the system: admin web app, charger display, chairman touchscreen, delegate touchscreen.
Why this was hard
Conferencing in a parliament looks nothing like conferencing in a conference room, but Shure needed one product line that served both. The same microphone unit had to behave differently depending on who was sitting at it — chairman, delegate, technician — even though the hardware was identical, with roles defined entirely in software. Voting screens had to fit votes with 2, 3, 4, or 5 options, topic strings ranging from one word to two sentences, units configured for one delegate or two sharing a single screen — every combination readable, tappable, and aligned with the physical positions of the people voting. And the touchscreen had to coexist with physical buttons on the same unit without competing or duplicating them.
FEATURED DESIGN DECISION 01
The voting screen layout
The voting screen had to work across an unusually wide variation of contexts. The hardest case was the Dual Delegate configuration, where two people share a single microphone unit and need to vote independently. I prototyped two layouts for the dual-delegate 3-button voting case.
Variant 1 — vertical stack with collapsible vote topic
Usability testing revealed that bolded phrases competed with the KPI cells above them, and readers' eyes bounced between the two. The shipping version bolds the specific quantitative values inside the narrative — -172 MW, $0.2B over, 84% — and leaves connecting phrases unbolded.
Variant 2 — horizontal layout aligned with seated positions
Placed each delegate's voting buttons on their side of the screen so the spatial layout of the buttons matched the physical seating positions of the delegates at the unit.
Variant 1 · Vertical stack with collapsible topic
Variant 2 · Horizontal, spatially aligned (shipped)
Two layouts for the dual-delegate voting screen. The shipped design prioritized spatial alignment with seated delegates over inline topic display.
I shipped Variant 2. The deciding rationale was a context I'd missed in my first pass at the problem: in most parliamentary and council settings, the vote topic is projected on a large screen at the front of the room. Delegates don't need the full topic on their individual screens — they need fast, confident button access aligned to the way they're physically seated.
Variant 1's collapsible topic panel solved a problem that didn't exist in practice, while introducing one that did: it broke spatial alignment in the Dual Delegate case. Variant 2 prioritized the actual high-frequency need (quick, accurate vote casting in the physical posture of seated delegates) over the lower-frequency need (reading long topics inline).
The shipping design used Variant 2's horizontal layout with a small truncation-with-tooltip affordance for the rare cases where a delegate did need to read the topic on their personal screen.
FEATURED DESIGN DECISION 02
Four surfaces, not one
I argued for shipping four distinct interfaces on a single hardware platform: admin web app, charger status display, chairman touchscreen, delegate touchscreen. These were genuinely different users with different needs, and forcing them into one surface would compromise all four populations.
The four-surface decision turned out to be load-bearing for the whole product. The admin web app could be as dense as IT administrators wanted because it didn't have to look approachable to a delegate. The delegate touchscreen could be as forgiving as we needed because no admin would ever see it.
What happened
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Won Best of Show at Integrated Systems Europe 2018
the largest professional AV trade show in Europe
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Deployed in government chambers and corporate venues
Notably at the European Union, Expo 2020 in Dubai, Event Hotels, and NYU
Best of Show award reveal at Integrated Systems Europe 2018, Amsterdam RAI.
What I learned
This was the first product I designed end-to-end as a designer. Three lessons stuck.
Document decisions as they're made, not after.
With an 18-month design-to-ship cycle and a team split between the US and Denmark, anyone who joined mid-project couldn't reconstruct decisions without written rationale. I started keeping a design log with the why for every significant choice.
For products with novice and expert users, design for novices first.
Power users adapt; novices give up. Both the chairman touchscreen and the admin web app benefited from this prioritization.
Process is design too.
The weekly triad replaced sequential design→engineering→PM handoffs with continuous critique against engineering feasibility and product priorities. The shift mattered as much as any individual screen. Other Shure Systems teams adopted it, and it shaped how I work in cross-functional environments since.
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