Using sound on an application is a very complicated issue. The big problem using sounds, designing websites with them, is that they are difficult to keep private. Everybody knows that unpleasant situation of sound unexpetedely playing while reading something online at the office.  

When to use sound? 

Keep in mind your audience. Sounds are not expected on websites like online newspapers or gubernamental sites. On the other side, they could be accepted on websites for children, music websites, online radios and such. 

Is the internet dumb?

Sounds could be used not only for advertisement, music and videos but also to improve usability like in the "real life", in desktop and mobile applications. For example, in the real life, closing a window makes a "click". Could you imagine a telephone that does no sound when you press a number? All this sounds are there to tell users that something is happening. These sounds should be as useful in the internet as in the real world. 

Unfortunately, many websites and web applications don’t use sounds. For example, Google Mail is not playing any sound when a new email arrives, something that is a default option for every desktop email client. 

What kind of sound?

In every application, desktop or web, the natural relationship between the sound and the action or information should always be respected. For example, clicking on a button should play a sound that resembles the mouse click, not a dog barking. 

These were a few tips using sound when designing a website. My general advice would be to use sound only if it is improving the user experience at you website. 

Music charts are another example of popularity-based organization of information and one of the sites with more of that is Last.fm, the online community for music lovers. The concept is very simple, users listen to music on their iPods or online, and last.fm keeps track of the listened songs and artists. Then, they make charts with the most listened and compares users’ taste.

The main charts are “Recently Listened Tracks”, “Top Artists This Week” and “Top Artists Overall”. Information is combined with artists’ pictures, the design in general is very cool:

Although I love this site I have found two usability problems. One is that for some charts some of the information is like hidden, for example, in the chart below is difficult to see the arrows indicating if the artist moved up or down on the ranking.

The second problem, that you can see on the same picture, is that the charts are updated from time to time, once a week or so. In my opinion, most users would expect to see this information updated all the time, or at least to have the option of getting “The last 7 days” or “The last week”. Probably to get the maximum of the charts in your site you have to keep them updated, so the users will come more often.

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.