Objects should shut up

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Objects should shut the fuck up

I have a small car, and it has a dual-tank: gas and LPG, which is a great way to reduce my car-related budget, as LPG is way cheaper. Unfortunately, when the tank is starting to get depleted, the car will emit strident and loud beeps to notify me about it. And every single time time, it startles me like Hell, which isn't something I appreciate very much, especially when I'm steering a 1 ton metal box to overtake a trailer at 130km/h on the highway. To make things even double-plus-good, a full-screen "LPG tank almost depleted!" message will cover the whole dashboard. The very same dashboard that constantly have at its bottom the current level of said LPG tank.

The only time I want my car to maybe make some noise is when some critical shit is happening, like the oil level decreasing at an alarming rate. Having it yell at me that I'm only able to drive around 100 more kilometers on LPG, while I have a full gasoline tank affording me a total autonomy of like 1000 kilometres is anything but. I hate this, I hate that it's not configurable, I hate that it's waking everyone asleep in the car (especially toddlers), and I fucking hate that my car is actively lowering the safety of its passengers by scaring its driver. And of course, the notification will repeat a couple of times, at seemingly random intervals, likely because the complete bellend who designed this terrible scheme is taking the ever-lowering worldwide car-crash statistics as a personal affront, and is on a mission from God to fix this.

This major papercut made me think about how making noise for anything but the direst emergency should be an off-by-default privilege that only the user can explicitly grant, instead if being the default for all electricity-powered objects. I'm a CyberSecurity Professional™, earning a living breaking into computer and computer-adjacent systems, so I own the bare minimum in terms of Smart Devices™, and yet, yet I realised that I still have a non-zero amount of infernal noise-making crap.

For example, my washing machine has an obnoxious alarm when it completes a cycle, that can fortunately be disabled via a (hidden!) menu. Now, I get it, it might be useful to have some kind of alarm so that you don't forget your soaking clothes and have them rot into a new variant of whatever medieval disease. But, the alarm, while exceedingly loud, only lasts a handful of seconds, making it close to useless. Moreover, if you forget your laundry long enough for it to decay, you kind of deserve to have a Nurgle cult growing in your basement. Even assuming for the sake of the argument that this anti-feature could somehow be useful, this isn't the only yapping caused of this fiendish machine: the fucking "beep" happening every time one turns the knob or presses a button can't be deactivated. And don't you fucking dare talk to me about accessibility: all buttons are touch-sensitive, so useless to visual-impaired users, and all tones are exactly the same, making them absolutely useless for anything but waking up/startling the sleeping and unsuspecting house inhabitants. But this isn't everything, of course there is more: it has a "cute" tone when it starts, for no fucking reason at all. Why is this a thing? Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea? What's the reasoning behind this? It's a washing machine, there is no complicated fragile boot sequence, no hazardous warm-up shenanigans: I press the power-on button, it starts. Imagine having this ludicrous behaviour on all your objects: Opening your faucet? "DUDUDUDUUUUUUUU!" Unlocking your front-door? "LULULUUUUULULUUUUUU!" Turning on the cooktop hood? "LALALAAAAAAALAAAAAALAAAAA!" Maybe turning your lights on in your living room? The Ride of the Valkyries starts blasting at full volume.

As electricity is green-ish and cheap-ish where I'm living, I have the luxury of having a drier as well, forming an unholy honky duo with the washing machine: while it thankfully doesn't have a startup sound, the interaction-beep can't be disabled there as well, nor can the alarm. You know, the alarm telling me that my clothes are dry… There is no reasons, let alone urgency, that I should get any form of audio notification about this. I could spent 6 months in the hospital after a car crash because of the aforementioned LPG seven trumpets, come back to my place, and find my cloths still impeccably dry.

The kitchen isn't spared either: my hotplates will try their very best to make everyone deaf should something like a dishcloth, or perish the though, some water be present on more than two touch-sensitive buttons at once. I fail to conceptualize what the issue is here, and why this warrants all this racket: doing nothing would be perfectly acceptable. Heck, if something really has to be done for whatever regulation bullshit or whatnot, how about blinking the lights used to convey that the plates are hot? Or, if you really need to take action, just turn them off automatically. Really, anything but something that would shame a car alarm in every way.

But the very best, my complete favourite, "the world class, maybe even the world champion" (kudos if you know where this is coming from), is a fucking baby-phone that beeps when you turn it on. The use-case is "monitoring a sleeping child", and the loud beep tends to wake the aforementioned kid up. May the gormless cock-up who created this absolute potato of a device spend his entire life walking on legos.

Fortunately, everything isn't complete garbage in this world, and I even have a couple of examples at hand:

My dishwasher: no sound whatsoever, it simply opens up when it's done.
My fridge: should I improperly close its door, it'll emit some faint noise for like 30 seconds. It's a totally valid important notification, as nobody wants to burn electricity to cold the room while the food goes bad.
My ebook reader: it's physically unable to produce any sound.

The world is dire enough as it is without having me adding to my shopping criteria "does it shut the fuck up?" to an already long list. If you're designing objects, please take some time to test their notification mechanism near an asleep toddler and/or a sleep-deprived lunatic, instead of making piling more noisy interruptions to our already notification-saturated reality.

Discussion (51 comments)

In safety industries, particularly aviation, "alarm fatigue" is a really big deal. You recognize that pilots have limited situational bandwidth, and you REALLY don't want to be bugging them about things you can avoid. I worked in collision avoidance systems (TAS/TCASI/TCASII), and spent nearly a whole year just working on figuring out when and how we could avoid warning pilots in cases where "we're not sure exactly what is going on, so tell the pilot just in case" could potentially annoy pilots in cases like take off and landing (where they have important OTHER things to be doing!)

It's a fun balance between "possibly don't warn the pilot about something they should know about", and "don't warn them if they are busy doing something important".

More devices should have a "squelch" switch!

My brand new car has a feature called forward attention warning which is driving me insane. It is essentially a small camera located at the steering wheel column which emit a series of high beeps and have an eye icon blink in the dashboard if the car doesn't think I am looking forward.

Cases in which this can happen. - I orient myself before overtaking another car on the highway or motorway. - I position my hand wrong on the steering wheel and the camera can no longer see me. - I put on sunglasses when I am driving against a low sun.

It can be turned off, but if you live in the EU it is required to enable itself once the car has been turned off/on.

It will also happily warn me if it thinks I am speeding based on errornous gps data. This feature also turns itself back on once the car has been turned off.

While we're at it, can we do something about the gigalumen blue light every device seems to have to indicate on/charging/charged? My house looks like a dystopia spaceship after dusk.

All the external noises are a big problem.

But the things that irritate me even more are the infernal modals and alerts on my computing devices. It is hard enough maintaining focus without having to spend an entire work session playing whack-a-mole at random intervals for a hundred different things that aren’t relevant. I never want to know that my scanner software has an update available.

I realized that at its core, this problem is caused by developers and product managers mistakenly believing that I care as much about their product as they do.

It would be nice if the gatekeepers had mechanisms that punished this behavior. Search engines should lower the rankings of every site with random modals. App stores could display a normalized metric of alert click through — “this app has an above average number of alerts that are ignored”.

When arcade machines needed to cycle players to keep the the quarters flowing, it created a aesthetic in game design that took a decade or more to shake when we switched to an economic model that rewarded keeping players on the site; in that earlier era, even things that didn't benefit from kicking users off did so, because...well, that's just the way you did things.

Now that the dominant economic model is driven by attention and engagement, even systems that don't benefit from it in the slightest are nonetheless infected by that aesthetic. I keep expecting to see a toaster that asks me to "like and subscribe" or a toilet that has pop-up notifications.

Free startup idea: An appliance brand that makes every home appliance with the following features:

* Absolutely never any beep or sound

* Direct controls, no "programs" (i.e. microwave has two knobs: power and time, etc.)

* No network connectivity of any kind (obviously)

With a strong brand identity and good marketing these would sell like sliced bread.

Go to a modern hospital emergency room, it's a cacophony of devices all vying for attention. I walked down the hallway and realized every room in the place had a different audible alarm—all active! I suspected the device manufacturers were all worried about liability for their device, making sure to notify that a patient had a problem. The end result for the medical staff was an endless chaos of noise. Complete systemic failure of UX from a practical standpoint.

One that I hate is GM cars that turn on the "reverse" lights in parking lots when the car isn't even turned on, or sometimes when there isn't even a person in the car. I'm sure someone wanted to turn those on as a convenience for people or maybe to indicate there is a person nearby? But those lights have a specific meaning which is no longer reliably conveyed by GM cars.

Unless it’s a smoke detector. In that case when it is running low on battery - despite also being hardwired - it should definitely warn you about the low battery… at 3am. Always. At. 3am.

When my wireless earphones reach 20 minutes of charge it starts warning me about this every minute. So this essentially cuts 20 minutes off it's battery life cause it's too annoying to use from then.

My previous Roomba had a bug where it would complain loudly at 3am about being unable to dock, 14 hours after its run cycle.

This led me to discover that there is no setting to disable sounds, you must take it apart and rip out the speaker, which I happily did.

I've switched to another brand of robot vacuum since then and that poor experience makes it pretty unlikely I'll use a Roomba again.

I'm spending about a grand to have a sensor in my golf door handle fixed because the car beeps for about 10 seconds every time it passes 10mph. Thinking of buying a car at least 15 years old so I can experience the lack of electronics again.

I can't believe the people making or testing these products have kids or even sleep at night. They must be vampires. We recently replaced Vornado fans . The older model had a basic mechanical switch -- silent, tactile , works 100% of the time, works in the dark. The new model has a capacitive touch interface that only works 30% of the time when touched. Impossible to operate in the dark. The worst part is the deafening shriek whenever you adjust the fan .

They should have advertised on the box: wakes your kids and your wife at 2am!

> For example, my washing machine has an obnoxious alarm when it completes a cycle, that can fortunately be disabled via a (hidden!) menu

This is why I really appreciate my GE washer which has adopted the Japanese aesthetic of a happy little jingle when it's finished instead of the ear splitting BUZZZZZZZZ of traditional American washers.

I honestly think that some thought needs to be put into these alarms, and maybe take a note from Japan when it comes to the _tone_ of notifications.

I often stick some tape over the beeper in products. I was trying a ceiling fan and it made a loud beep every time you pressed a button on the remote. Not very good if say adjusting things in the middle of the night.

My peeve: electric cars that make noise to make sure that blind people around them can hear them like they hear gas-powered cars--except they make it 10x as loud as any gas-powered car.

Yes but UI engineer performance is measured by user engagement and user engagement is measured by how much crap is clicked on.

Whats measured is whats managed, and so we have a bunch of unnecessary crap to click on because that pushes the engagement metric up.

I wonder if the LPG system is aftermarket, and as such doesn't know the amount of gas left in the tank.

It reminds me when I get into my car. Ding ding ding ding to put on your seatbelt. Yet I haven't even put the car in drive.

My phone is constantly sending me messages trying to get my attention to buy something (even though on iOS there should be a per-app marketing opt-out, it's not enforced at all)

Or spamming 10 emails if you abandon a cart...

I don't like the idea of 'levels' where we can set which messages to get (like TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR), because that inevitably changes how these companies set their levels. After all, marketing affects their bottom line, so that makes it ERROR for them.

I always thought I was weird for not ever letting the microwave beep when it ends. I always open the door a second before it ends. Sometimes you'll see me running across the house just so I can turn it off before that annoying beep. But then I started working at a co-working space, and I see a sticker on the microwave that says "Be kind, open the door before it beeps".

This problem seems exacerbated by increasing number of stakeholders involved with feature development. Especially ones that you can't easily say no to.

This is often communicated as too many project managers involved with a program. Hilariously visible in something like GMail. I can quickly count about 5 badges on my page of numbers that I don't think I'll ever actually care about.

Gets more difficult with things like disaster alerts. These are, generally, life saving. But, as we have gotten better at detecting things, it can feel silly if we have them too often. (My favorite is the alarm people have when they start to learn that coyotes are always passing through the yard.)

Every time I start my car I get a window pop up with a paragraph of text to make sure I follow the rules of the road and drive safe. Then I get a warning to connect to wifi and update my car. I miss the days when a simple light on the dashboard was all we had for warning and I wasnt getting bothered by nonsense.

GE is a major offender. And it's meaningless noise... the little jingle that the oven plays when it's done preheating is the same as the one the dishwasher near it plays when the cycle is done. Zero useful information.

Oddly, that song is a lot like one they used in the 1970s in pantyhose commercials.

Objects should also stop having always-on blue LEDs for power indication or whatever. When I turn off the lights at night, my living room basically stays the same luminescence, because of the wash of blue LED light from every stupid little gadget that is desperate for me to know at all times that it has power.

I miss writing like this. It feels like old internet. It was hyperbolic and silly but there was often a real point of view at the bottom of it and it felt crafted. Guys like Maddox and Jay Pinkerton and Tucker Max wrote like this, and they were wildly offensive and I disagreed with a lot of what they had to say (almost all of it, really) but I guess what I want to focus on is the format: it's nice to read something that isn't just a thought-terminating snowclone meme. It invited discussion by investing up-front in fleshing out the writer's thoughts. So much interaction on the internet now is just getting a shot in and disappearing back into the forest before the person you're responding to can reasonably react. It's generating the screenshot of their comment and your "drop the mic" response, designed to be consumed by people as a single serving after the comment rather than to engage in anything substantive.

Also the author is absolutely right: whether it's my car, my washing machine, my oven, my fridge, an app on my phone, w/e it needs to stfu about anything that is non-critical. I do my best to enforce a rule where if I'm using a tool for a workflow and that tool interrupts with information or options not critical to that workflow I just stop using that tool. Difficult in the case of a car but at least in the case of apps I can usually enforce it via a three strikes mechanism. No, I don't want to sign up for email alerts. No, I don't want a tour of your new features. I'm using your old features, they're why I downloaded you. If you stop me from doing what I need to do in order to ask me for a rating in the app store, I assure you that you do not want my rating in that moment.

To quote a meme someone posted in this thread (and make myself at least slightly guilty of the reductive, screenshot-oriented, thought-terminating type of dialog I railed against above), "I am a divine being. You are an object. You have no right."

I have a set of bike lights from Topeak that will flash the main headlight into the eyes of oncoming drivers when the battery is low, even though it has a battery indicator on the top. It gives me a heart attack every time.

I learned the other day my office building has hidden speakers dispersed throughout each floor which blast synthetic white noise.

It's quite loud, I had assumed it was an improperly installed HVAC system...

I will defend the dryer alarm case somewhat. For my dryer, it displays a time until the cycle is complete, but that time is wildly inaccurate (as in, the display will say 45 mins and sometimes the cycle takes twice that to complete). It is useful to get a notification when the dryer is actually done in my case. Granted, the dryer should accurately report how long it will take to run, but given that it doesn't a "cycle complete" alarm is the next best thing.

Man I love ranty britishisms. Author's right though, at my last living place I had a drier that summons screeches from hell when clothes were dry. I mean that buzzer would make your heart stop, and if I didn't open the door, it would run again for a short period to keep the clothes warm then do the abhorrent sound again, all for a state (dry clothes ready for folding) that is absolutely non time-sensitive. Horrific user-centered design.

Hell yes. My Skoda makes the exact same "DONG!" for "screen wash running low" as it does for "engine failure you're about to crash and die". I have a slow leak in my screen wash tank so this is really annoying.

Whenever I search my refrigerator or freezer for more than 20 seconds or so, an infernal beep begins. I have found myself singing Pink Guy's STFU either aloud or to myself when this happens. Needless to say, I appreciated this article.

I read this article to the sound of Cake's 1996 album 'Fashion Nugget' song - 'Nugget'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3sQDwOTFJU

Crappy technology calls attention to itself.

Good technology doesn't.

Bill Shatner played a character in the 80's that expressed this sentiment: https://youtu.be/Ebo0aLLPYwA?t=20

My microwave beeps when it’s done. And then keeps beeping every 30 seconds until you open the door. Very important safety feature, I guess

Appliances that only have touch controls and make beeping sounds for every button pre^Wtouch. UX design has truly peaked. >:(

Smartphone notifications. Every now and again I turn off DND because I'm expecting a call, and every time I turn it on again soon after - the continuous barrage of pinging noises makes the phone unusable. I have notifications turned off for all apps by default!

Objects should notify when there is good reason. And ideally, these should be configurable.

Just to nitpick...

"You know, the alarm telling me that my clothes are dry… There is no reasons, let alone urgency, that I should get any form of audio notification about this. I could spent 6 months in the hospital after a car crash because of the aforementioned LPG seven trumpets, come back to my place, and find my cloths still impeccably dry."

Removing your clothes when they are still warm reduces wrinkles, enough so that you can avoid ironing things like t-shirts, which is just annoying. (I recognize that some slobs are okay wearing a shirt that looks like it's been yanked out of the jaws of a dog, but I am not interested in addressing the pathological case.)

Important exception: If the noise my whiteware makes is a fun jingle, I'm all for it.

Fucking agreed. Anything less than a fire alarm should shut the fuck up.

That includes apps (games) that spend a minute screeching their godawful "mood music" during a loading screen. Or worse, won't allow you to shut the "music" off during a forced minutes long tutorial.

Why Android doesn't have a permission system for sound, I don't know. I'd love to be able to just forbid every app from making any kind of noise.

Amen. I will research the next car I get and I will not consider any car that makes annoying noises. And if I can't find one I will buy an older model.

I hate that it's not configurable

Everything is configurable if you're determined enough. ;-)

I actually find that I really like East Asian appliances that sing little songs as indications. It’s much less annoying than loud beeping, and can be helpful once you learn what each song means.

Anyone have any good literature on alert fatigue as a general concept in design?

We don't care about profanity on HN but we do have a problem with clickbait, which "Objects should shut the fuck up" arguably is, so I changed the title to "Objects shouldn't talk". I realize "talk" isn't quite accurate here but "should be quiet" or "shouldn't make noise" felt a bit too bland. Suggestions welcome as always!

Edit: never mind, an obviously better solution is to just de-"the fuck" the original.

> My dishwasher: no sound whatsoever, it simply opens up when it's done.

I need the model of this thing! Mine fires 5 deafening beeps when it's done and theres no option to turn it off. It has woken me up in a panic many times off the sofa.

Hopefully they do something about the annoying self-checkout machines too. The ones that yell back at you loudly for every cent you insert. Employees dislike them too.

I find it infuriating that navigation apps throw ads when I'm stopped at a red light. This is THE moment where I should glance away from the road and plan my routing

Outta curiosity what kind of car is this? Or what brands offer the dual tank setup? Living in the US, I’m not aware of any cars that come from the factory with dual gas/lpg tanks. Here in the US it seems to largely be an aftermarket modification some folks make.

Yes. Also, instantiated objects from some random library shouldn't write to stdout and stderr, which I thought it would be about.