Lessons in UX: When designing user experiences, don’t forget the sound
As you may have seen from many of my other posts here, I’m a big Star Trek fan. Big Big fan. When I got the DVD of the new Trek movie last week, I immediately dived into the extras to see how the producers had pulled the rabbit out of the hat and saved the franchise. One of my favorite special features was on Ben Burtt (formerly of Lucasfilm) and his sound design for the movie. This segment repeatedly emphasized how important sound was to add subtext and reinforce key moments of the film.
Burtt also noted that the churps and beeps in the original series when the characters did something (like open a communicator or lay in a course) were always friendly and musical in tone and that alerts and warnings were almost always guttural and sharp tones. So, of course, being a user experience guy, I started thinking out applying this to my own work.
Even though I design applications for the web, I see there is obvious value in using sounds to add a layer of alerting and/or confirmation for the users. And, interestingly, the major computer operating systems follow the same design principles that Burtt noted that the original Star Trek did.
Both Windows and Macintosh operating systems have audio cues and alerts, but it is interesting to see how different the designer’s approaches are. Microsoft is much more aggressive in their use of sound, while the UI designers at Apple tend to be more minimalistic about sound design. Also, Apple’s sounds tend to be more melodic in tone and Microsoft’s more… well, the best word I can think of is “guttural” with harsh DONK sounds accompanying errors.
No judging, just observing.
I noted previously the future has already arrived, it’s just not the future we expected. If you look at the future of experience design, I think that music and sound is an important thing that we should begin to consider part of our responsibilities. In other words, when designing experiences, we need to think beyond the screen and keep sound in mind.
