It wasn’t hard to spot Yongseok Bang, lead designer of the new Samsung Galaxy Buds Live, the moment I joined a video call with him and other employees gathered around a table in one of Samsung’s South Korea conference rooms.

Samsung went in a different direction with the final branding in an attempt to emphasize the open-air design of the Buds Live.

There were three areas of focus: originality in design, ergonomic fit, and the desire for form to follow function — another way of saying that these earbuds had to sound good no matter what they ended up looking like.

But getting the Galaxy Buds Live to accommodate smaller ears was one of the biggest design challenges.

(In my review, I mention that a friend had trouble getting them to fit her ears comfortably.) The small wingtips were added to the earbuds for this purpose; the Buds Live sat naturally in the folds of the concha for people with medium- and large-sized ears without any help, and the wingtips — two sizes come in the box — helped keep them in place inside ears on the tiny side.

Samsung also had to approach the engineering process differently than it had with the more traditional Galaxy Buds and Galaxy Buds Plus.

Bang pointed out that the components are placed sideways as opposed to being stacked vertically like in the Buds Plus.

This allowed for a thinner, more subtle design that wouldn’t noticeably protrude from the ear like many wireless buds do.

But in almost every other regard, Samsung succeeded on those focus areas that guided the development of the Galaxy Buds Live