OOONO

OOONO is a Danish tech company, Europe’s leading traffic assistant making driving safer through small, connected devices. We designed the full sonic identity and UX sound design for their newest product, CO-DRIVER NO3 — a new focus display that shows drivers exactly what’s ahead and how far, at a glance.

Industry:

Automotive Tech

Services:

Audio Identity UX/UI Sound Design Audio Architecture

Overview

OOONO is a Danish tech company dedicated to making driving safer through connected devices.

Because sound is how OOONO speaks to drivers, whose eyes need to stay on the road, the brand set out to give its alerts a distinct, recognizable sonic identity that informs clearly without distracting.

Working with OOONO was incredibly exciting, as it presented a unique challenge: creating a sonic identity for a product designed to keep drivers’ eyes on the road and their attention on traffic. This made functional audio feedback the most important touchpoint, requiring us to strike the perfect balance between intuitive, instantly recognizable sounds and a distinctive brand identity.

The challenge

The challenge with OOONO was two fold. On one hand OOONO wanted to upgrade their sound design for CarPlay, as the car speakers allow for more sophisticated design. On the other hand, OOONO wanted to evolve the sounds in their product speaker. These are heard many times a day, so they needed to sit comfortably in the background of a driver’s routine.

So our job was to both upgrade their sound so that it would translate into the bigger car speakers with a bigger frequency spectrum, and to refine their existing product sounds so they carry the brand more clearly and stay pleasant, even after the hundredth listen.

“When a product’s primary user interface is sound, audio isn’t just an add-on – it is the entire user experience. Our goal was to create alerts that feel like a gentle tap on the shoulder.”

Søren Elsborg

Creative Director

Sonic Minds

The solution

Developing a gentle & intuitive sonic architecture

To solve this we took a deep dive into OOONO’s brand and desired sonic brand attributes: Premium, Warm and Inspiring a Sense of Safety, and developed first the audio Branding strategy around it.

After establishing the foundation of their audio identity, we elaborated it into a unified UI Audio Architecture, where each UI’s desired goal and play frequency was carefully considered.

Driver psychology & anti-fatigue ergonomics

Drivers hear alerts many times a day, so comfort over time matters as much as clarity. By shaping alerts with warm mid-range frequencies and organic decay tails, we ensured the 50th alert of the day feels as smooth, gentle, and unassertive as the first.

Building community and engagement

OOONO’s service is powered by its community: drivers who report traffic information for everyone else on the road. We designed a dedicated Community Feedback sound to make reporting feel rewarding and pleasant, encouraging more people to take part and, in turn, making the service better for all.

The result

By transforming OOONO’s sound landscape, we helped them achieve a seamless translation between their physical device speakers and full car audio systems through CarPlay. The new alert sounds maintain brand recognizability while staying comfortable for drivers worldwide, and the Community Feedback sound rewards drivers for contributing to the service.

Listen to the CarPlay versions here:

Words from OOONO

“For our new CO-DRIVER NO3, we worked with Sonic Minds on the product’s sound design. They were flexible and professional throughout the entire process, and good at turning our needs into sounds that are intuitive and easy for users to understand.

The biggest challenge was that the sounds had to work both through the car’s speakers and through the much smaller speaker in the device itself, without losing their character. Sonic Minds solved that. They have a solid understanding of what a speaker is capable of, and of how sound is perceived in the situations where the product is used.

The result is a sound identity that fits both OOONO as a brand and CO-DRIVER NO3 as a product. We’ve been very happy with the collaboration and can recommend Sonic Minds to anyone who wants to take sound seriously as part of their product.”

Alexander Kaiser Lauritzen

Brand and Communications Director

OOONO