The Plip-Plop from the top

Some of my friends came round the other day while I was watching my TiVo. They are ex-TiVo users who have moved on to Sky+. As soon as they heard the magical "plip-plop" of TiVo they started to reminisce about how cool it was. It's funny how instantly recognisable the sound of TiVo is.

Matt Haughy of PVRBlog has managed to get an interview with TiVo's Director of User Experience, Margret Schmidt, in which they discuss the wonderful simplicity of the whole TiVo interface, including the sound cues. It makes interesting reading.

MH: TiVo is not only one of the best examples of powerful-yet-easy visual interfaces, I'd say TiVo is probably the only device that I actually enjoy hearing. The sound interface is a helpful, effective addition to the UI and rarely gets in the way. I can't point to many products that use sound effectively aside from TiVo and I'm curious how the team developed it. Were there long discussions or testing involved to help determine how intrusive sounds should be?

MS: Since TVs aren't silent, we didn't want the TiVo interface to be silent either.  The initial sound concepts fell into a few categories.  Some were mechanical, some synthesized, others more organic.  We quickly identified the organic, happy sounds as better in line with our brand value of "playful".  It actually didn't take too many iterations to get it right.