The design and evaluation of a sonically enhanced tool palette

ABSTRACT

This paper describes an experiment to investigate the effectiveness of adding sound to tool palettes. Palettes have usability problems because users need to see the information they present, but they are often outside the area of visual focus. We used nonspeech sounds called earcons to indicate the current tool and when tool changes occurred so that users could tell what tool they were in wherever they were looking. Results showed a significant reduction in the number of tasks performed with the wrong tool. Therefore, users knew what the current tool was and did not try to perform tasks with the wrong one. All of this was not at the expense of making the tool palettes any more annoying to use.

REFERENCES

• 1: Michel Beaudouin-Lafon , Stéphane Conversy, Auditory illusions for audio feedback, Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.299-300, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/257089.257331]
• 2: Meera M. Blattner , Denise A. Sumikawa , Robert M. Greenberg, Earcons and Icons: Their Structure and Common Design Principles, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, v.21 n.1, p.123-124, July 1989 [doi>10.1145/67880.1046599]
• 3: Brewster, S. A. 1994. Providing a structured method for integrating non-speech audio into human-computer interfaces. PhD Thesis, University of York, York, UK.
• 4: Brewster, S. A. 1997. Using Non-Speech Sound to Overcome Information Overload. Displays 17, 179--189.
• 5: Stephen A. Brewster , Murray Crease, Making menus musical, Proceedings of the IFIP TC13 Interantional Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, p.389-396, July 14-18, 1997
• 6: Stephen A. Brewster , Peter C. Wright , Alistair D. N. Edwards, An evaluation of earcons for use in auditory human-computer interfaces, Proceedings of the INTERCHI '93 conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.222-227, May 1993, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 7: Brewster, S. A., Wright, P. C., and Edwards, A. D. N. 1995. Experimentally derived guidelines for the creation of earcons. Adjunct Proceedings of BCS HCI'95. Huddersfield, UK, 155--159.
• 8: Alan Dix , Janet Finlay , Gregory Abowd , Russell Beale, Human-computer interaction, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997
• 9: Hart, S. and Staveland, L. 1988. Development of NASA-TLX (Task Load Index): Results of empirical and theoretical research. In Human Mental Workload. P. Hancock and N. Meshkati Eds. North Holland, Amsterdam. 139--183.
• 10: Reason, J. 1990. Human Error. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

INDEX TERMS

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors, Performance

Keywords:
Sonically enhanced widgets, auditory display, human--computer interaction