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An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
- dfsegoat 10y agoAlong these same lines, one of my favorite examples of this type of work (human factors related to attention/alerting) is "Bitchin' Betty" and company - the female voice that makes up the "oral alert system" from the F/A-18 superhornet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx7-yvXf6f8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx7-yvXf6f8 A lot of research went into everything from the gender to the tone of the voice so that pilots would know to immediately pay attention to the warning system above everything else. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitching_Betty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitching_Betty
- tome 10y agoThat's really interesting! And now and off-topic question: why would rolling right stop a plane from going in the sea?
- dfsegoat 10y agoNot a pilot or engineer - but I imagine if the plane were in a "banked left" position (prolonged left roll) where altitude was being lost because of "slip" - then rolling right would restore lift / level flight http://2bfly.com/assets/slipinbank21.png http://2bfly.com/assets/slipinbank21.png
- jenamety 10y agolikely just trying to get wings level. Likely triggered due to the high bank angle plus low altitude. PDF Warning: Page 121 - Aerodynamic Forces in Flight Maneuvers https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/phak/media/pilot_handbook.pdf https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...
- cyberferret 10y agoPossibly the pilot was in a sustained left banking turn and didn't realise that he was losing altitude and/or airspeed. The "Roll Right!" command was possibly to force him to go 'wings level' and maintain altitude. Any time you bank the wings of a plane to make a turn, you have to also pull back on the stick to maintain the same amount of lift to keep you in level flight. The more you bank, the more 'back stick' you need to maintain the lift. It's a logarithmic corellation, i.e. in a 90 degree banked turn, it is impossible (you need infinite lift) to maintain altitude. Most aircraft get to the point where the bank is just to steep and you cannot generate enough lift to hold your altitude any longer. Pulling back on the stick some more will just end up bleeding off airspeed and putting you into a stall/spin. At that point your only recourse is to go back to 'wings level' and rebuild airspeed.
- ethanbond 10y agoThat's fascinating, and oddly endearing. Thanks for sharing!
- scoot 10y ago"A lot of research went into everything from the gender to the tone of the voice" And according to that wikipedia link, most of it was wrong or conflicting!
- ErikVandeWater 10y agoI feel like cursing should also have been considered.
- Waterluvian 10y agoAll I can hear is my A-10 Simulator saying, "ALTITUDE, ALTITUDE!" in what seems like a calm female voice, but I can't un-hear it.
- dvtv75 10y ago15-20 years ago, I played one that kept saying "OVER-G!" I didn't hear that, though, I heard "Aubergine!"
- dwyerm 10y agoThis has always reminded me of Ben Rubin's (EAR Studio) early work on notification tones. One of his projects was the ticket gates in the NYC subway system. Those high-pitched piezo speaker beepers are cheap and simple, but it is difficult to localize where the beep is coming from, and the single frequency can't communicate much. Mostly, you can't tell if your gate beeped, or the one next to you. His solution was, among other things, to turn it from a beep to a bell tone. That alone made it better. It seems like the audio design of things is often missed. I'm excited about products like Google's Home and Amazon's Echo because we're finally considering audio as a first-class user interface.
- avn2109 10y agoNYC subway turnstiles are my go-to example of bad audio UX because they make the same noise after a successful swipe as after a failure!!
- Melchizedek 10y agoJust record the sound of an open-plan office.
- kps 10y agoThe article addresses that — a good alarm shouldn't interfere with getting things done.
- cableshaft 10y agoI never really thought about the fact that alarms are researched and have dedicated designers. This was a very interesting article, thanks for sharing it. I might have to start checking Atlas Obscura more often if they have articles like this on it.
- sumoboy 10y agoHospital monitors beeping all the time are so annoying, stressful. Last visit I just turned off the machine I was annoyed.
- dingaling 10y agoNurses also seem to adapt to filter out the noise which seems practical but means they can also unconsciously ignore alarms or at least require longer to respond. In airliner cockpits this also became a problem when CRTs superceded analogue instruments as the constant drone of their cooling fans masked important aural cues. It has improves with the use of cooler LCDs but even now a 737 cockpit is shockingly noisy. ts
- empath75 10y agoYeah, my dad was just in the ICU, and you could never tell if he was dying or if the saline bag was just running low. So stressful to be around.
- beart 10y agoThe last time I was in the hospital, the sound was only really ever used when the nurse or doctor was present in the room. It allowed them to monitor the status of the patient without having to stare at a display. All other times, the sound was typically turned way down or even muted as they were monitoring an independent readout in another room.
- lostlogin 10y agoGood units don't just squawk out a beep, they fade in and out and have an inoffensive tone. The pitch changes with increasing/decreasing heart rate. These ones are good and the others need to die.
- mhalle 10y agoThe biggest alarm culprits in the hospital are infusion pumps, which are responsible for administering IV medication at the correct rate. An air bubble in the line, a crimp because the patient's arm is bent, or the end of the bag of medication all cause a relentless beeping that usually requires manual intervention. What's more, the beeping happens at the patient's bedside. Of all the actors who are in a clinical hospital environment, it is the patient who is the absolute least empowered to do anything to change the situation, but who is also the most negatively impacted by an alarm. Loss of sleep is a major problem for hospitalized patients[1]. Perhaps nurses respond more to patient beeps/complaints than to the alarms themselves, but it's a bit sadistic if you think about it (though unintentionally). [1] http://journals.rcni.com/doi/pdfplus/10.7748/ns.29.28.35.e8947 http://journals.rcni.com/doi/pdfplus/10.7748/ns.29.28.35.e89...
- kw71 10y agoThe alarm sound I like the best is the one that dutch ambulances use. I wonder where I can buy such an emitter.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- phailhaus 10y agoI wish this article about alarms had sounds that readers could play.
- raamdev 10y agoI discovered when I was in my late teens that given a week or two of the same daily alarm, my subconscious would eventually recognize the sound as my alarm and I'd get up, walk across the room, turn it off, go back to sleep and wake up an hour or two later with absolutely no recollection of turning it off. I eventually discovered that using my phone as an alarm, with my call ringtone as the alarm sound, was the only way to trick my brain into forcing me awake: my subconscious has no way of knowing if it's an actual phone call that I need to be awake for or if it's just the alarm, so it forces me awake to figure that out. Its worked for years now.
- ep103 10y agothis is... genius
- kctess5 10y agoMaybe it can backfire and you'll subconsciously silence your cell phone during actual calls.
- degenerate 10y agoCertain apps curtail the "turning alarm off and going back to sleep without realizing it" problem. Sleep as Android has a feature where you need to perform a conscious task (math problem / tap on X jumping sheep / etc). Sure you might still solve the math problem and go back to sleep, but there is no doing multi-operational math subconsciously. You're going to know you are awake and will remember.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoYou'd be surprised. I tried the multiplication of two-digit numbers puzzle and very quickly I became pretty proficient at solving math problems in a semi-conscious state...
- squeaky-clean 10y agoI've had trouble getting up and staying awake forever. I was terrible in my teens, my parents would actually throw water on me some mornings. Now I use an alarm app (Sleep As Android, I'm sure there are others) that can choose different puzzles and difficulties. To turn off the alarm, I'd have to solve 3 problems like "2x5+14-6" without getting any wrong. I eventually got really good at doing math in my sleep apparently, because I overslept a few days after about a year of using it. Later finding that my alarm was in the solved state. Now I use the mode that makes you physically shake the phone a certain number of times (and a certain amount of force) to turn off the alarm. I have it set so it takes about 20 seconds of vigorous shaking, and by the end of it I'm fairly awake. I did the ringtone thing for a bit and it just made me really hate my ringtone. I would never hear my alarm and go "maybe someone is calling", but I would always hear my ringtone and go "Wtf, why is my alarm app...? oh..."
- LargeCompanies 10y agoMany years ago I created a social alarm clock idea which was panned and hated.. lol. Though at the time I had no tech skills and never released our prototype. Personally being woken up to something funny, cute, meaningful from a friend or loved one was great. Though the challenge for this idea to work is you have to put restraints via audio volume levels to ensure a great experience (waking up laughing or with a smile or another positive emotion) happens on each use. Also know the likes of each user and what's happening in their life. I still believe it's a great idea/new form of communication that if done correctly the masses would love, as when it wakes you up to something you connect with you smile and or laugh; changing your morning routine for the better! I wish Apple would allow a user the ability to wake up to a radio URL!!!
- a_c_s 10y agoInteresting idea, partly because it is the total opposite of what I want in an alarm clock: everyone's different! As a heavy sleeper I'm always groggy and not social when I get up. My perfect alarm clock would have a loud, blaring alarm (imagine what a movie alarm would sound like to indicate nuclear war or some other form of certain doom). I think I'd either be annoyed by or sleep through something cute like laughter.
- LargeCompanies 10y agoWell then you could tell your friends to choose loud, crazy and fun alarms and or choose the option to crank up the volume. I keep thinking I should get back to working on it and finish it the way I described above...
- michael_h 10y agoUse the excite bike 'overheat' sound and use it sparingly.
- js2 10y agoThe plane’s speed slowed to dangerous levels, activating the stall alarm—the one, in the words of Popular Mechanics, “designed to be impossible to ignore.” It blared the word “Stall!” 75 times. Everyone present ignored it. Probably not: In an article in Vanity Fair, William Langewiesche noted that once the angle of attack was so extreme, the system rejected the data as invalid and temporarily stopped the stall warnings. However, "this led to a perverse reversal that lasted nearly to the impact: each time Bonin happened to lower the nose, rendering the angle of attack marginally less severe, the stall warning sounded again—a negative reinforcement that may have locked him into his pattern of pitching up" which increased the angle of attack and thus prevented the plane from getting out of its stall. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
- digi_owl 10y ago> the system rejected the data as invalid Thats like suddenly having your car freeze the speed gauge or something because the speed would be absurd. Who the flip comes up with this things?!
- slededit 10y agoYou need to balance this with the ability to detect malfunctioning sensors. Its not so trivial with that requirement.
- hammock 10y agoSo after reading the article, is the only way to evaluate an alarm through human testing? Is there anywhere I can read more about theory of alarms? Very interested in this, as well as how it might crossover to music and songwriting.
- amelius 10y agoThe most distressing sound I know is the Shepard–Risset glissando, also known as the Barber-pole sound because it seems to continuously drop in frequency. Wikipedia has an audio sample [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
- CarVac 10y agoThat's pretty good, but I think the Chicago tornado sirens are more hair-raising. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy_oX6SURRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy_oX6SURRE
- mderazon 10y agoHoly crap
- Declanomous 10y agoI thought of this as soon as I saw the parent to your comment. I had an ex call me one time scared witless because of the siren. She was from Seattle and had never been in a severe thunderstorm with a tornado warning before. She was in a car with a bunch of her friends who were also from Seattle. She kept asking what she should do. I kept telling her that they should pull over and seek shelter in a building. Her follow up question each time was "Is there really a tornado? What do we do if there is a tornado?" It was really strange from my perspective, because I've done so many tornado drills the response is second nature. That being said, if there was a major earthquake I'd probably just freeze for the entire duration, and only remember to hide under a desk or in a door frame after it was over. The first time I felt an earthquake I was 23, and I didn't even realize what happened until I read about it in the news later. It seems like one of the problems with designing an alarm for a particular level of urgency is that people react in different ways to stress. My ex was not calm under pressure, and would totally freeze up. I'm reasonably cool under pressure, but alarms will derail my train of thought even when I'm concentrating on the issue at hand. I personally think that unless the necessary course of action is extremely trivial, such as "leave the area immediately and seek shelter", constant alarms are more of a hindrance than a help. I like alarms that have a brief alert to get your attention, and then proceed to give a lower-level alert for a while, with the more pressing alert sound playing again as long as the issue is still present. For instance, one of the the best design features I've found in my Subaru is how they handle traction control. In the Toyota's I've driven, when Traction control comes on the system starts chirping like bearing that's about to fail at 10k rpm. In my Subaru, a light flashes on the dash, just in your peripheral vision. It's definitely helpful to know TCS is being activated, but I would hardly call it an emergency. The two times TCS seems to be activate are 1) when pulling out from a dead stop, and 2) during emergency maneuvers. In the first case, a constant alert is unnecessary. For one thing, you'll probably notice TCS has activated when it cuts the throttle. For another thing, if you can't immediately stop whatever you are doing, it's probably because you have a more pressing matter, like situation 2. I had a cab cut me off to pull a u-turn from the right last year when the roads had 14 inches of snow on them. I was about 8 car lengths from the cab, and there was a car stopped in the oncoming lane waiting to turn left. I slammed on my brakes, and realized I would never stop in time. I steered to the left and hit the gas while leaning on my horn. The cab slammed on it's brakes and I passed just in front of it. The car on the left side was about 3 car lengths past the cab, and I was already on the brakes and spinning my wheel left to avoid it. I immediately had to turn back to the left because I was pointing towards the opposite side of the intersection. I gave my car a blip of gas to straighten back out. In this process, my traction control came on three times: once when initially slammed on the brakes (likely tied to ABS activation), once briefly when I turned back to the left to avoid the oncoming car (likely preventing me from sliding in to a frontal offside collision), and once when I tapped the brakes trying to avoid the far corner of the intersection (likely preventing me from running off the road ass-backwards.) At no point would the methodology of the Toyota be helpful in that situation. I needed to focus 100% of my concentration on the road and the two cars, not on the fact that my car was helping me not die. On a similar note, the fact that Subaru builds a bit of slide in to their traction control is very reassuring. It gives you a lot of feeling for where the limits of the car are. I think I probably would have just ridden out the t-bone had I been in a Camry; I have no idea where the limits are on those cars because the traction control locks down and slide immediately, and the steering has all the feel of a limp-wristed handshake. Of course, a Camry is also FWD, and I had snow tires on my car, so I probably was getting some steering help from torque vectoring in the rear. I was also really grateful that my mom had taken me to empty parking lots when I was learning to drive and had me drive (and slide) around until I understood how cars lost control, and what to do.
- dmckeon 10y agoA environment of multiple, repeating alarms - whether "Stall!" in a cockpit every 3 seconds, or a hospital room with multiple beeps, with only 8 of 1455 especially significant, sounds to me to be like being a programmer trying to fix a critical problem with a PHB manager hovering at one's shoulder, barking "Another server crashed" and "Have you fixed it yet?" and similar several times a minute. Perhaps such environments could benefit from a button that silenced all current alarms for at least 30 seconds, leaving the operator a brief quiet time to focus, modulo new alarms. Asking the annoying manager to go to some mildly distant place to find an appropriate manual or checklist binder (that may even exist!) may work well for some programmers and some managers. For a more common example, spend a few minutes in the lobby of a busy or understaffed McDonalds and listen to the cacophony of beeps.
- CaptSpify 10y agoI wonder how much of this is "false alarms" as well. At my office, we had our disk-alert thresholds way too low for a while. Our intent was good: "If someone sees this and aren't busy, they'll jump on it when they get time". But that just meant that everyone ignored the alert until it was too late. Now, you don't want the threshold too high either, you have to find a balance. signal-to-noise is hard.
- lostlogin 10y agoPatient monitors have a "silence" button. Next time you are near one, have a look at the water patterns, as they are often well used.
- digi_owl 10y agoI do believe cockpits have a "master alarm off" button, that will shut it up until something new happens (or the problem state persists long enough).
- gaur 10y ago> with only 8 of 1455 especially significant This. It doesn't matter how clever you make the alarm. If it mostly goes off in the absence of real danger, you are teaching people to ignore it.
- busterarm 10y agoI'm notoriously bad about sleeping through alarms. I used to have to use 4 at a time. The two most effective things that I've done to wake myself are: a) I had my computer play a song with a high BPM at 100% volume on repeat starting on a timer. Shutting it off required typing a few commands to kill the process. This was effective for a while until I started sleeping through it too. b) What I do now is I have a cheap clock radio. I set the radio dial to an ultra-conservative talk radio station and then superglued the dial in place. I also superglued the volume dial at its max position and broke off the snooze button. This is highly effective at getting me up and motivated to leave the house.
- r00fus 10y agoHave you considered using a sunrise clock?
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoA friend of mine used to have a cheap alarm clock of tge type that rings indefinitely, placed between two metal baskets that he locked together with padlocks he'd thrown away the keys to. So he had to pick a padlock in order to turn off the alarm. Not only did he wake up early, he became a skilled lock picker.
- throwanem 10y agoConsider the bugle call "Reveille" [1], which has a long history of being used to wake the potentially recalcitrant. I've used it as a wake alarm for several years now, replacing the classic iOS "Alarm" tone that I used to use - "Reveille" is considerably less jarring, but I've found it much more effective in producing a transition from sleep to wakefulness that doesn't include the shock produced by something like "Alarm" - or the anger I'd surmise is produced by your method B above. Works for me, at least. Might be worth a try for you, too. I should think almost anything would be preferable to the self-abuse of loud talk radio. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reveille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reveille - has a playable sample
- busterarm 10y ago
- to3m 10y ago"Most adults can hear sounds between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz" - 9 year old adults, perhaps... I'm not an alarm designer, but my understanding is that if you want pretty much everybody to be able to hear something, not just your kids and your dog, 10-12KHz is a much better upper limit.
- ascorbic 10y agoAnecdotally, around 19 kHz was the cutoff among most of my colleagues in their mid 20s to mid 30s when I tested this a few years ago.
- cpeterso 10y agoI don't want my alarm clock to annoy me. I just want it to wake up. I'd like an alarm with a gentler, pulsing sound that only gets louder or more annoying if you don't get up soon. I found an Android alarm app that tried to wake you when you're in a shallow sleep phase. IIRC, the app would quietly ring 45, 30, and 15 minutes before the wake time you set, so if you happened to be in a shallower sleep phase then you would wake more naturally. I stopped using it, though, because the phone UI was too annoying to use as an alarm clock.
- Kluny 10y agoI was thinking the same thing. I don't want to wake up angry. When someone figures out a way to wake me up that feels like being gently kissed by a loved one, prodded by a dog, or the smell of frying bacon and fresh coffee, then they'll really have something.
- crooked-v 10y agoYou can get coffee makers (including, I'm sure, K-cup variants) with timers. The "bacon alarm clock" is also a real thing, being basically a timer-driven toaster oven with precooked bacon in it, but that'd be a bit more worrying to run automatically than just a coffee maker.
- codyb 10y agoYea, I just stopped using alarms unless I'm going to get less than six hours of sleep. Sometimes with six hours I'll set one for six and a half hours from when I'll be sleeping just in case but the vast majority of times I wake up before my alarm anyways. I guess I'm lucky in that I fall asleep quickly the vast majority of the time but when my girlfriends cacophony of noises alarm goes off it is an instantly irritating way to start my day. Just awful.
- jquast 10y agoI found the fitbit watch vibration alarm to be very gentle.
- russdill 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYcMcf-o3Zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYcMcf-o3Zs Anyone hear a weird beeping noise? Wonder what it could mean...oh well, I'm sure it's not important, we're about to land anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw Geez that sound is annoying, I hope it stops soon.
- cyberferret 10y agoAir incident investigations have shown that under stress/duress, a pilot will ignore things that seem stupidly obvious due to focusing on one aspect of the crisis. That first landing looked far from 'perfect'. He was coming in high and possibly too fast, and I daresay he was focusing too much on how much runway he would have left after landing. He could have also assumed that the warning was the overspeed warning from extending landing flaps at too high a speed (though most light aircraft don't have that warning system). That second one was a lot less explicable - looked like a normal landing approach. Surprised that the instructor also didn't pick it up. Interestingly, that second pancake landing is in exactly the same type of aircraft that I did my initial flying training in. Something about seeing that instrument panel, and hearing that warning alarm made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and raised my pulse a little. Even 25+ years after I last flew that type!
- jenamety 10y agomy favorite example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw I believe it's better to read the description after you watch the video.
- slim 10y agoMy favourite engineered sound is the sound of a 90' Nokia phone losing sight of the infrared port when syncing. It's a very low frequency sound that made me immediately realign the device the first time I heard it. I was amazed.
- dognotdog 10y agoSounds interesting. A quick googling fails to turn up anything, but I'd love to hear it. Do you remember any specifics that might help finding The Sound?
- 1_2__3 10y agoThe Air France example is not a good one - there's no indication the pilots didn't hear or heed the warning, it's that a loud voice blaring "STALL!" was only one of multiple "pay attention to me now" things in the cockpit. To claim the alert needs to be more noticeable/annoying/loud/whatever is completely wrong - they needed information, not alerts.
- algesten 10y ago> Above 20,000 Hz, she says, an alarm “starts sounding not really urgent, but like a squeak.” Not sure it's even right to call it a squeak. Many adults hear nothing at 20,000 Hz.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago> The statistics say that most of these alarms are not indications of peril That's because they are CYA lawsuit deflectors.
- Pica_soO 10y agoThere should be away for users to combine alarms with and/or blocks in hospitals. That way the cacophony would be reduced to the important cases.
- kevinskii 10y agoIn my freshman year in college, a student was killed by a slow moving freight train while walking between the dorm and the campus. We all wondered how it possibly could have happened. A few months later we understood. The first few times you see a bellowing metal beast with its horn blaring, you can't help but to watch out for it. A few hundred safe encounters later and it actually becomes very easy to ignore it. There were some other near misses that year.
- bradknowles 10y agoSomething I discovered years ago is that there are whole libraries of alarm sounds. And companies like Apple have licensed many of the best known. The problem occurs when you choose a phone alarm sound that is frequently used in the industry for seriously nasty things. Like frequently used in many movies for the biggest disaster that will be occurring, leaving you in a panic to turn off the sound on your phone right in the middle of the most important part of the movie. Or, you work in the central IT Services department of a major university, and you work in the building where the main computer room is located. And your alarm sound happens to be the same one as used on the floor for the halon dump fire suppression system. And you're standing at the doorway of a co-worker talking to them, when your phone alarm goes off. And their office happens to be right next to that of the datacenter manager. So far as I know, there were no heart attacks or strokes that resulted from my accidental use of the same alarm library sound that day. But I was strongly incentivized to switch my alarm sound to something else.