To banish repetitive harsh beeps when pressing multiple buttons, like when you’re cycling through the microwave’s menus, Starling has also re-created the soft, premium click you get on your smartphone when typing. “I just wanted to see what a 4,000-Hz beep for one millisecond would sound like, and I was like, ‘Oh, that actually sounds pretty good.’ It would make a microwave infinitely more satisfying to use,” Corelitz says.
Coogan says it can be more challenging to communicate a lot with a little, which made the challenge more enticing to them both. But the response on Instagram seems to suggest there’s more than sound aesthetics at stake here.
“One of the top things that people kept commenting over and over again was, ‘Oh my God, I would pay $50 more for a microwave that sounded better,’” Coogan says. It seems there’s gold in them thar trills.
Sound Design
Richard Hughes, now Volvo’s design lead for digital user experiences and interfaces in North America, was the principal UX designer at Whirlpool for 15 years. He knows his beeps. He also knows why established brands still sell bad-sounding microwaves.
“A lot of these companies don’t have internal audio expertise,” Hughes says. “They do on engineering for product noise, but very little sound design.”
Hughes, while at Whirlpool, did indeed experiment with beeps in a remarkably similar way to Starling, using piezos hooked up to an Arduino. And he says the company launched a KitchenAid Pro Line toaster where people loved its piezo sound.
“It was a very expensive toaster, but people referenced its ‘flight attendant call button’ sound,” Hughes says. “It was a much softer, rounder sound, and people love that to this day.” No such care went into fettling microwave audio at Whirlpool, according to Hughes, because the company just didn’t produce a premium model where users would expect better beeps. Many of the microwave’s sounds are carried over from one product to the next.
“[Manufacturers] may update the aesthetic, but the technical insides, that behavior spec is carried over, which is why they all sound the same, they all sound awful, and it’s that piercing noise we’ve all come to hate.”
Fortunately, it seems we’re finally about to enter a world where our microwave sounds don’t suck. “It’s trickling down,” Hughes says. “Companies have been focusing on product lines with more margin, but you’re going to see that cascading into the microwave.” He added that when he finished at Whirlpool, he led a sound strategy initiative for a few products that should be entering the market right about now. As part of those strategies, Hughes made it imperative that Whirlpool assess what the lowest common denominator looked like at the piezo level.
This is, after all, the very definition of low-hanging fruit. An easy win. No extra hardware cost, just attention to detail. “Within the last few years, realization has hit that ‘delighters’ play a key role in someone purchasing your product,” says Hughes. “The things that make it a little more magical.”
