Think about your daily sound journey at home, for example. You may wake up to a specific sound and perhaps in the dark you can't disarm it. Making that sound event repeat itself until you actually wake up. It may work, but perhaps not in the way you'd like. Then you turn off the air conditioning and it gives you a descending melody (musical notes that are played from high to low), indicating that you have turned it off. In the kitchen, you turn on the coffee maker and the sound invades the house, as does the smell of coffee brewing. You go to the garage and turn on your car, hear the alarm being disarmed, open the door and, as you close it, feel the sound echoing outside cease immediately.
On the street, you realize you've forgotten to put on your seatbelt when you hear a high-pitched icon that repeats until you stop the vehicle and buckle it up. Arriving at the office, you receive a notification telling you that the next meeting starts in 10 minutes. You open your laptop and receive more notifications that invade your mind, affecting your concentration and possibly hindering your productivity. At the end of the day, back at home, you put something to eat in the microwave and your favorite drink to chill in turbo mode. Meanwhile, your washing machine is spinning with an almost deafening noise. Then there's a melody announcing that the washing cycle has finished, and soon afterwards other sounds are mixed in, announcing that your dish is heated and your drink is just the way you like it.
These are just a few of the many sound examples that you and many other users experience on a daily basis. Some consciously and others not so much. You may not realize it, but there are sounds that can make your experience more exciting and enjoyable or even impact on your stress. In a study we carried out on the impact of sound for Brazilian consumers, more than 50% of people said they were disappointed with the sounds of the products they purchased. Some even said they had returned their purchases because of the sound (or noise).
From functional and digital sound icons, when we press a like button or receive a push notification, to consequential sounds, which correspond to the acoustic factors of a product, such as the sound produced by your laptop keyboard or the noise generated by your vacuum cleaner running, for example, there are many moments when sound is an element that can positively or negatively affect the user's journey and their perception of a certain experience and brand. /wp:paragraph wp:paragraph Just as I reinforce that a brand's identity needs to be thought of through sound as well as visuals, the UX Design process needs to bring the sense of hearing into the design of a new product or application, for example, and understand what sound and vibrational codes will be present in this new project. It goes beyond functional issues and enables the brand to create unique experiences with meaning. For this, behavioral immersion before even thinking about sound is a crucial point.
When we started the project to redesign the functional sounds of FIAT cars in Latin America, we knew that this was the first step. We had just defined the brand's sound dna, but in order to design sounds linked to the driving experience we needed to immerse ourselves in the behavioral bias of different user profiles and cultural codes. To do this, we brought together a group of Brazilians and Argentinians, not only based on the brand's premises, but also with an inclusion bias, where people with a certain degree of hearing impairment were also listened to. Through diaries that went beyond the sound, we asked each participant to reflect on and report on their different experiences with their cars and to give their perceptions of which feedback sounds were positive and which were negative.
For both groups, the results were surprising. In the wider range of sounds from the most varied cars and brands, the meaning of many sound icons was not understood and, worse, the quantity of sounds was also a factor that bothered everyone. In joint auditions using an AUDIOKIT provided by our team to each participant, containing high-quality headphones so that we had the same emission source, we realized another intriguing point: the functional and current sounds of many cars within our continent sounded unpleasant. From these collected points, we realized that we needed to design a sound vocabulary, bringing the brand into a truly human-centered territory and connected to a more pop and warm dna. We invited the users themselves to regroup and rename the group of sounds
present in the driving experience. Spontaneously, the collective suggestion was to migrate from alert\security sounds to groups more connected to the reality of these drivers, such as daily routine\daily care\security. Through this more human listening, we also identified that we needed to move away from a territory of sharp, mechanical and unpleasant sound icons to an environment of softer, more intuitive sounds. In addition, based on tests carried out on the project, we tuned all the car sounds. This is because musical sounds, within a western scale, sound more pleasant.
Another point of attention, before defining the sound composition parameters, was to map out the different hardware characteristics present in the brand's vehicles. We did this because we wouldn't be able to change this and we always build sounds thinking about how they will reverberate in their final and real stage. Every detail was taken into account to define sound parameters and thus design the new sounds of FIAT cars.
Another exciting project, guided by our Sound Thinking methodology and which reinforces the importance of generating full and inclusive listening in order to design unique, consistent and relevant insights for the brand, its users and all those around it.
(Re)think design through sound.
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