In my continuing investigation of the use of sound to improve graphical widgets I and Catherine Clarke (one of 4th yr students from last year) looked at how we might use sound in graphics packages. These impose a heavy load on our visual sense so perhaps sound could be used to reduce this.
Sound was specifically used to aid problems with tool palettes and finding the current mouse coordinates when drawing. Tool palettes have usability problems because users need to see the information they present but they are often outside the area of visual focus. An experiment was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of adding sound to tool palettes. Earcons were used 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 tool. All of this was not at the expense of making the interface any more annoying to use.
As part of the talk I will describe the sounds used, the experiment undertaken and the results we obtained.
For more information about this talk please contact stephen@dcs.gla.ac.uk