A Hotel Site That Plays Music on Arrival

The site

A small hotel in a harbour town has twenty rooms, a lounge with a fireplace and a view across the water. Its website opens on a wide photograph of the harbour at dusk.

A second after the page appears, a recording of solo piano begins to play. A small speaker icon in the bottom corner turns it off, for anyone who finds it.

Each time the visitor opens another page (rooms, rates, the restaurant), the music starts again from the beginning. The player has no memory of having been switched off.

On an iPhone or iPad the music never plays. Where the player should be, there is a blank space.

The inference a visitor makes

Picture someone at her desk over lunch, planning a weekend away. She opens the site, piano music comes out of her speakers into a quiet office, and two colleagues look up.

She does not look for the speaker icon. Closing the tab is the fastest way to stop the sound, so she closes it and goes back to the search results for the next hotel.

The inference is not about the music itself. It is that the hotel never thought about where its guests would be when they read its site.

What the music breaks

Sound that starts by itself works against nearly every situation in which people plan a trip:

• Quiet places: offices, shared rooms, transit, and late evenings with a household asleep.
• Other sound: the visitor's own music, a video, or a call in progress.
• Screen readers, whose spoken output has to compete with the piano.
• Page weight, since the audio file downloads alongside the photographs.
• Phones and tablets, where the player shows as a blank space.

Each of these reaches the visitor before a single room has been seen, which is the opposite of what a hotel's home page is for.

Sound nobody asked for

A browser plays sound as soon as a page asks it to. The visitor gets no warning and no choice, and with several tabs open may not know which one is playing.

Chrome now marks a tab that is making sound with a small speaker. That helps visitors find the noise, and close it, even faster.

Closing the tab is the one control that always works, so it is the one visitors reach for. The hotel loses the visit in the time it takes to find the culprit.

A mute button that is hard to find

The speaker icon is small, pale and tucked in a corner, because it was designed not to spoil the photograph. Those are the same qualities that make it hard to find in a hurry.

Worse, the choice is forgotten. A visitor who mutes the music on the home page hears it again on the rooms page, because each page loads the player afresh.

Remembering the choice for the rest of the visit takes only a little code, but older music players rarely include it.

Phones and tablets stay silent

The player is a Flash file, which iPhones and iPads have never run. Even sites using newer audio code find that Safari on those devices waits for a tap before playing any sound.

So the music meant to set the mood reaches only computer users, many of whom are at work. Phone visitors get the blank space instead.

The weight of the file

A few minutes of music makes a file of several megabytes, larger than all the home page photographs together. On a computer it loads with the page and competes with the pictures for the connection.

Visitors on a coffee shop's Wi-Fi or a weak home connection feel that delay. The rooms appear more slowly so that a track nobody chose can play.

Visitors who use screen readers

People who are blind or have low vision often use a screen reader, software that speaks the text of each page. Music starting at the same moment talks over it.

Accessibility guidelines ask for a way to pause or stop any sound that runs by itself longer than three seconds, or to set its volume separately. An unlabelled icon in a corner is hard to find by ear.

People who move around a page with the keyboard meet a similar problem: reaching a small icon can take many presses of the tab key, with the music playing all the while.

A worked example

The owners of the harbour hotel heard about the music at their own front desk. A guest checking in mentioned that she had closed the site twice at work before booking by phone from home.

The music had been added years earlier by the original designer, to give the site the feel of the lounge. Nobody had heard it since, because the owners' own computers had long been muted.

The autoplay and the Flash player were removed, and the blank space on phones went with them. The home page now leads with the rooms, the rates, a button to check availability and a line on where the hotel is.

A short recording of the lounge's Friday pianist sits on the page about the lounge, behind a play button with a clear label.

Now the visitor reaches the rooms without dealing with sound first, and anyone who wants the music can choose it.

The counter-case within the site

Sound has a place on a hotel site. A video tour, the pianist in the lounge, the waves below the rooms: each can help a guest picture the stay.

The difference is the play button. Sound the visitor chooses arrives when they are ready, at the volume they set. Sound that starts by itself arrives when they least expect it.

So the hotel keeps its atmosphere, and the visitor decides when to hear it.

What to change

1. Open the site on a computer with the speakers on.
2. Turn off any sound that starts by itself.
3. Remove old Flash players and the blank spaces they leave.
4. Lead the home page with rooms, rates and location.
5. Put any music behind a clearly labelled play button.
6. Check the page weight once the audio file is gone.
7. Ask a colleague to open the site at work and report back.

Step two removes most of the problems above at once. The other steps make sure that whatever replaces the music helps the visitor reach a room.

Another welcome that stands between visitors and the site, the animated intro with a skip button, gets its own teardown in a bakery site that opens with a Flash intro.

Frequently asked questions

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