Using non-speech sound to overcome information overload

Abstract

With ever increasing amounts of visual information to take in when interacting with computers, users can become overloaded. One reason is that computers communicate solely by graphical output. This paper suggests the use of non-speech sound output to enhance the graphical display of information to overcome overload. The question is how to integrate the display of sound and graphics to capitalise on the advantages each offers. The approach described here is to integrate sound into the basic components of the human-computer interface. Two experiments are described where non-speech sounds were added to buttons and scrollbars. Results showed sound improved usability by increasing performance and reducing time to recover from errors. Subjective workload measures also showed a significant reduction. Results from this work show that the integrated display of graphical and auditory information can overcome information overload.