Stephen A. Brewster
Abstract
This article describes 3 experiments that investigate the possibiity of using structured nonspeech audio messages called earcons to provide navigational cues in a menu hierarchy. A hierarchy of 27 nodes and 4 levels was created with an earcon for each node. Rules were defined for the creation of hierarchical earcons at each node. Participants had to identify their location in the hierarchy by listening to an earcon. Results of the first experiment showed that participants could identify their location with 81.5% accuracy, indicating that earcons were a powerful method of communicating hierarchy information. One proposed use for such navigation cues is in telephone-based interfaces (TBIs) where navigation is a problem. The first experiment did not address the particular problems of earcons in TBIs such as “does the lower quality of sound over the telephone lower recall rates,” “can users remember earcons over a period of time.” and “what effect does training type have on recall?” An experiment was conducted and results showed that sound quality did lower the recall of earcons. However; redesign of the earcons overcame this problem with 73% recalled correctly. Participants could still recall earcons at this level after a week had passed. Training type also affected recall. With personal training participants recalled 73% of the earcons, but with purely textual training results were significantly lower. These results show that earcons can provide good navigation cues for TBIs. The final experiment used compound, rather than hierarchical earcons to represent the hierarchy from the first experiment. Results showed that with sounds constructed in this way participants could recall 97% of the earcons. These experiments have developed our general understanding of earcons. A hierarchy three times larger than any previously created was tested, and this was also the first test of the recall of earcons over time.
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Index Terms
- Using nonspeech sounds to provide navigation cues
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An evaluation of earcons for use in auditory human-computer interfaces
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Reviews
Martha Elizabeth Crosby
Advances in the understanding of how people use computers have led to the greatest innovations in software development. Brewster describes three experiments that show how structured nonverbal audio messages called “earcons” can provide navigational cues in a nonverbal user interface. Earcons are abstract musical tones that use repetition, variation, and contrast of qualities such as timbre, register, intensity, pitch, and rhythm in structured combinations to create sound messages. Experiment 1 used a file system hierarchy of 25 nodes on 3 levels. The participants correctly recalled 81.5 percent of the 14 earcons they heard, showing the viability of an aural interface. Experiment 2 was designed to generalize these results by addressing the influence of sound quality, method of training, and time on the percentage of earcons recalled. Brewster reports that participants could still recall the earcons after a week, but that the quality of sound and the type of training influenced how well they recalled them. Experiment 3 used compound rather than hierarchical earcons to represent the structure from experiment 1. Earcons were created that did not require the participants to remember more than seven rules. The new design improved the number of earcons recalled from 81.5 percent to 97 percent. This type of earcon design has the advantage of creating arbitrarily sized hierarchies, and participants do not need to be retrained for each new structure's size and shape. This paper provides interface designers with valuable information. It will be particularly valuable to those who are responsible for designing complex displays to clearly present large amounts of changing data in ways compatible with users' information needs. In additio n to developers of applications that use telephone-based interfaces, mentioned by Brewster, this work should be of particular interest to designers of multimodal computing environments.
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