The world on silent

We can estimate that there are 8.3 billion mobile phones on this planet used by
approximately 5.3 billion people. There is no universal consensus or data that tells us exactly how many people keep their phones on silent, but from our own personal experience we each know that we ourselves, our friends, family, people next to us on the subway keep phones on silent.

Why the sound goes off

People keep their phones on silent for multiple reasons, a mother of a newborn
tums her phone on silent so that it wouldn't wake the baby up. The haptics can
create a loud noise if the phone is placed on a surface that amplifies the vibrations, so she might tum them off and set her phone to some visual feedback and that in turn becomes a habit that she never thinks twice about. Besides this example that could be arriving from personal experience, there are multiple others, that include notification overload, spam reduction, societal pressure or the wish to regain control over one's own focus, choosing when to pay attention to the notifications.

A mismatch, not a preference

These scenarios illustrate a clear mismatch between the designers intent and theusers desire and... this is why having a strategy and deliberate sound design in your app is no longer an option; it has never been an option or nice-to-have.
It is not that people want to have silent phones, they want to avoid hearing sounds that are untimed, intrusive, poorly made and causing fatigue or stress. This ties hand in hand with fundamentally designing how the app functions and how it pushes notifications for the user.

Yes, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but the gap between great and average is in taking all of the parts seriously - they make up the whole.

Our why

This is our why, the user, their experience and delight. We work towards a better sounding world where every sound is deliberate, made with a purpose, supporting a function, and created with beauty and excellence. Made by artists devoted to the craft, devoted to forever pursue excellence in their craftsmanship in creating these sounds.

Sound alone does not make the experience, it is heard in its context and is a part of an ecosystem. The ecosystem of an app consist of many moving parts and they each deserve great attention by designers that understand each of these parts

We have made sounds for products, apps, scanners, washingmachines, you name it and regardless of the product in front of us, we always do our utmost to create the best sound for the problem in front of us.

A hundred tries for a dozen

When we work with UX sound projects, sometimes the timeline of the project allows us to explore, deep dive and test multiple directions and hundreds of sounds before landing in the final 12 or so, yes it takes a hundred tries to get a dozen excellent sounds. But sometimes we are onboarded late in the process and don't have much time to explore. This is still the best choice to take in experts on sound, because we have laid the foundation of working hours and hours on multiple projects and apps, tested limits and possibilities of countless devices, so we have a team that has developed a taste and a hunch for things that will work. In contrast from a developer who is dedicated hours of writing code, recognises the need of sound for a function, drops an .mp3 file with something and calls it a day. Yes, there might be that one time when this case hits a lottery and it becomes a legendary sound. But in reality in the U.S. Powerball one jackpot winner is expected for every 292.2 million tickets played. And in reality most legendary UX sounds have been made by incredible artists, dedicated to their craft and down the stream this leads back to the beginning of this article, the user turns the sound off… and the data shows that sound off is a huge lost opportunity for brand recall.

“If what we use everyday is made with art and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide.” Bruno Munari