Everything these days seems to make noise. Not just alarm clocks and trucks backing up and car alarms that go off for no apparent reason and stay on for hours. But cell phones, PDA's, regular phones, and microwaves. Everything, it seems, must make noise to alert you to what it's doing.
In my office, we have an all-in-one fax/copier/printer/scanner. Which, of course, beeps. It beeps when there's a paper jam. It beeps when it's out of paper. And for some reason, it beeps when you open the drawer to put more paper in. Now, I understand the first two - assuming you're not sitting right next to the machine, you probably want to be alerted that it's not printing. But why when I open the drawer? And it's not a quick, short beep, either. It continues for probably 20 seconds (which may not seem long, but trust me, it is when you're right next to the machine). If the paper drawer is open, clearly someone opened it, so who is it alerting that the drawer is open? Me? I know it's open - I just opened it! - to put in more paper, which it just beeped to tell me I needed to do!
My other problem with same said copier is that it's default function is fax. Always. Not just when I turn it on, but if I haven't done any copying for a while, it reverts to faxing again. The problem is that this particular machine isn't hooked up to a fax line. So for our office, this is a never used state! Why not leave it on whatever function I did last? With perhaps the fax as the default state after the power is turned on? A nice idea, but I think not well tested.
4 comments:
Haha, nice post!
Your specific copier seems like it's an example of 'knee-jerk' design. (Yeah, copiers beep, so our copier should beep, right?) Perhaps their goal was to alert you to what state the system is in, but it sounds like they only are alerting you that the system is in some state, without providing any context from the audio feedback.
This reminds me of when I found out my cell phone could set different vibration rhythms (I almost never have my ringer on) for incoming calls, texts, and voicemails. Once I learned to recognize the different vibrations, I got way more information from a feedback channel that used to be just binary.
Great post on an underappreciated concept in design - the hated superfluous beep. It's incredibly annoying! I have two examples of particularly unhelpful beeps:
1. When I pull into the parking garage at Lake/Franklin every morning, I press a button to get a ticket. AFTER I remove the ticket from the machine, it beeps at me and then the gate comes up. Huh? Is the beep alerting the gate that it's time to rise? If I didn't take the ticket for 5 seconds, or never hit the button, then I deserve a beep. But this is senseless. Who are they alerting? And of what?
2. This happens less frequently than a few years ago, but many gas stations have payment systems that beep a zillion times per transaction - do you want a free car wash (beep), do you want a receipt (beep), thank you (beep). No, I don't want anything other than to get out of the cold and back in my car! Stop beeping! I always feel like I have to respond to each query so that the transaction (eventually) ends properly and my credit card isn't charged for the next guy who pumps gas. The beeping enables the paranoia!
- Chris Keating
Haha.... I was just commenting in regards to beeping at ATM's. I think eventually we may all lose our ability to hear or respond to "beep beep beep" because it's so predominant and so useless. No... but I'm pretty sure when we were learning basic design priniciples the word useful came before feedback. It's seems this has been lost in a never-ending sea of beeps.
I think that some of it (ATM's and gas pumps) is meant to be feed back ... some of those membrane keypads are so cheep that it is hard to tell if you have pushed the button. Of course a few more cents on a good keypad and it would be a non issue ...
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