Tag Archives: audio

Designing With Audio: It’s Doesn’t Have To Be Annoying

We’ve been working on a project around here that is very audio-focused, and that’s a little unusual for us. Most of the time, the visual is the primary medium, and if there’s audio at all, it’s an ornament. Flipping the script, if you will, has been eye- and ear- opening. Some of what we’ve learned we will be able to use back on our more traditional projects.

The first pre-conception that some of us had was that audio was annoying, or a nuisance, or something that was frivolous. Surely, when it’s used poorly, it can be all of those things.

But as I type this blog post, I’m listening to the sound that the keys make as I strike them. It’s a feedback mechanism — in addition to the tactile one, of course, but an important one nonetheless. I still long for (and keep threatening my workmates that I’ll get) the old, heavy, metal IBM-style keyboards that really made a ruckus when you typed on them. The deeper tactile feedback was useful (and it really built finger strength!), but the more solid tapping/thunking sound was a key part of it.

If you’re an iPhone/iPad user, think of the beeping sound you get when you invoke Siri. You don’t have to be looking at the device to know what you did — it’s immediately obvious. How do you know? The sound. It becomes an interface-navigation feedback piece.

Then there’s the more traditional navigation feedback — where audio *is* the interface. The clearest example of this is hands-free interfaces in cars, but they exist on all kinds of other devices, too. Navigation systems that read out turn-by-turn directions, for instance. The audio is so important that it’s a selling-point, a key feature.

As we delved further into this audio project, we realized that by being mindful of the audio design as much as (or more than) the visual design, we could achieve a similar combination of functionality and beauty. We just had to toss our preconceptions at the door – and open our ears.

WebRTC: Live web audio/video chat without plugins

Most of the design and development technologies we work with every day are in ‘evolution’ mode, not ‘revolution’ mode. Enhancements are made, bugs are fixed, but the leaps are relatively small. A browser here adds support for the latest HTML5 canvas feature, a device there adds an API for better map coordination. Nifty, but a little light on the ‘wow factor.’

With the release of Firefox 22 this week, though, there’s a browser advancement that has the potential for a real leap: WebRTC is now baked-in and turned on by default. That means both Chrome and Firefox have it up and running in their latest versions. It will soon be ubiquitous (or perhaps ubiquitous-ish until IE follows along…).

Why is this so great? WebRTC is a W3C standard that allows for real-time communication (thus the RTC) in the browser — audio chats, video chats, whatever. No plug-in for users to download and install. Cross-platform and cross-browser compatible. Just code and go.

It will soon be much more trivial to just throw a video customer-service chat on a help-desk website. Or bake it into a community website to allow for in-site community chats. Or integrate it with the many more social networking sites with varying results depending on the site (you can let your imagination run on that one).

The possibilities are pretty remarkable. It’s a great case of where the technology itself has been around a long time, but by establishing a standard, the power is in the interconnection. Like, I don’t know, almost all Internet-based technologies.

There’s a good getting started tutorial over at HTML5 Rocks, and you can also jump off of the WebRTC home page. Either way, it’s worth a click-around. I think this will be big.