Just a little Cooqy

Being a rampant piano-player and former synthesizer junkie back in the 80’s, I love the power of sound. Sound effects are frequently embedded within applications, like the familiar Windows startup theme, or the jingle of a new e-mail arrival. Used properly, sound effects can enhance the efficiency of using a computer, similar to how sounds help a fighter pilot effectively manage a large amount of information. Used improperly, sound effects can confuse, distract, and annoy to no end.

Flash provides easy mechanisms for embedding sound into applications. For those web developers accustomed to developing in HTML, the ability to create sound can be a tempting toy to explore. I can imagine that there is a generation of web developers who have never developed thick client applications for Microsoft Windows, Apple’s OS’s, or IBM’s OS/2 (how’s that for a blast from the past?) who would become enthralled at the prospect of using cool sound effects in their web app.

Resist that urge, young grasshopper.

Flash has gained a terrible, yet well-deserved, reputation for annoyance. The worst offenses are:

1. Having a Flash animation play before an HTML website loads, along with the requisite “Skip” button. Here’s a hint for developers: if you create something that you think needs to be skipped, don’t create it in the first place!
2. Flash music that accompanies a website…darn you, I’m trying to hear my favorite artist playing on Pandora!
3. UI design with a lot of eye candy but doesn’t follow standards, causing hide-and-seek searches for functionality.

Cooqy widgets only use a single sound effect: a mouse click. The website home page (read my earlier post on why Cooqy’s homepage is currently in Flash) does splurge and play a jingly sound when launching Cooqy or the Widget Wizard, but that’s it. I’ve used two sound effects in total.

Why just a mouse click sound?

Well, the mouse click sound serves a very functional use, in that it provides feedback that the mouse click event was successful. To make Cooqy usable in a widget form factor, some of the controls have been made smaller than would otherwise be done. That makes it sometimes hard to hit a button on the first try, so the mouse click sound provides feedback when user actions are registered.

More importantly, as a widget it is important that Cooqy doesn’t interfere with other sounds that may be more important to the user…background music playing through Pandora, for example.

I have experimented with a few additional sounds in the past, such as a “zip” sound when the search options or category tree are animated to open and close. The result has never been satisfactory, no matter how cool the sound effects may be. The cool factor works the first couple of times, but quickly diminishes. More sounds always seem to cheapen the experience and wear out the ears.

I think this is because after so many years of using the Internet, silent surfing has become the norm (minus some background music or podcast). We expect web pages to be silent, therefore anything running within the browser is expected to be silent. When we stumble onto a page that generates noise, it’s like an electric shock!

Another reason, is that sound on the Internet to this point is primarily associated with the dreaded Flash ads. Surfers have formed a Pavlovian association between sounds on the Internet with undesirable Flash advertising.

I’ll call this Yeager’s Posit #1 on Web Apps: Internet users expect to surf in silence. Music players, video players, and related tools are expected to generate sound and are oftentimes running in the background while surfing. RIAs, widgets, and other web apps should use a bare minimum of sound, primarily to confirm user inputs are registered.