From the landing page: "One of the programmers set up the computers so that a bell would ring every time an order came in."
Continuation of the quote in the WSJ source: "A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off."
Continuation of the quote in the WSJ source: "A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off."
Nevertheless, I think I could find a "softer" sound that would be less jarring. Maybe let users select from different sounds or upload their own. Or something.
I read somewhere about a company that did monitoring by playing white noise that corresponded with certain key metrics (such as the rate of new users). The noise was invisible until it changed slightly in pitch, which meant something unusual was happening.