The design and evaluation of a sonically enhanced tool palette

Brewster, S.A. and Clarke, C. (2005) The design and evaluation of a sonically enhanced tool palette. ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, 2(4), pp. 455-461. (doi: 10.1145/1101530.1101542)

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.

• Item Type: Articles
• Keywords: Sonically enhanced widgets, auditory display, human--computer interaction
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Brewster, Professor Stephen
• Authors: Brewster, S.A., and Clarke, C.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science; Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Journal Name: ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
• Publisher: ACM Press
• ISSN: 1544-3558
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2005 ACM Press
• First Published: First published in ACM Transactions in Applied Perception 2(4):455-461
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher