Interaction design

‘Unpressable buttons‘ has written a nice post about sound design in products. There are numerous examples where companies spend tons of money just to get the sound right. Volvo is known for testing endlessly just to get the typical Volvo sound for closing the door. A second example are the coffee machines that use beans. Nowadays the beans can be grind without any noise but that coffee machine would not sell at all. The customer wants to hear heas beans being grinded; it is part of the coffee brewing experience.

Unpressable buttons use the example of artificially created shutter sound of a pocket sized digital camera which you still have with modern SLR’s.These camera’s work so silent that they use this sound for either enhancing the user experience or (more importantly) to give audible feedback to the user about the status of the product.

Enhancing or destroing the user experience?

When the articial sound is designed properly it can enhance the user experience, the user coud experience the product with a higher quality. But when the sound is designed in a poor way it could destroy the user experience. For example; a shutter sound that is unsharp, cluttered or too loud does not correspond with the expected sound. It is likely the damage you can do with a poorly designed sound to the user experience is a lot bigger then the improvement you can get with a good designed sound. So be cautious in doing so.

Providing feedback

Although sound affects the user experience the main function of sounds in pocketsized digital camera’s is to provide feedback about the status of the camera. One common problem is the difference between focussing (the image freezes) and actually taking the picture. By using different sounds the user gets informed about this difference. As unpressable buttons have said;

It’s anachronistic, it’s inappropriate, it’s extra noise in an already noisy world – but darn it, it works for the user. And that, my friends, is usability design!

And we fully agree.