I was sitting at my desk watching John Allspaw’s Alert Design presentation in the corner of my screen, while doing some ‘real’ work, and I heard this odd noise. It was familiar, it was an alert sound, but it wasn’t in the right context. It wasn’t my phone, or my PC… eventually I realised it was the noise the our car makes when you are low on fuel (a soft ‘bong’ on recent BMWs). Looking out the window, way down the street was someone loading their BMW with stuff, setting off an alarm.
Anyway, context is important for alarms. The presentation is interesting.