A survey of UI sounds used in consumer electronics and user awareness

Abstract

Even today "beeps" are mostly used in consumer electronics (CE) as user interface (UI) sounds. Though this has not changed for at least 10 years, we think UI sounds could be designed more useful and fascinated. This time we investigated what kinds of sound are used on recent CE UIs, and how users use and what they think of these sounds. As a result, users mostly understand the message when they hear the sound, which means the sound functions as a UI sound. However, users neither like nor dislike these sounds. We propose, therefore, to use UI sounds, which are melody, voice, and even synthetic tones (which means not only beeps but also various timbres.) This would enable us not only to express the messages intuitively but also to express the product's own unique images (including the branding image) and make it easier for users to distinguish between products.