Principles for Improving Interaction in Telephone-Based Interfaces

This study aimed at evaluating the use of non-speech sounds to support navigation in a real mobile phone menu. The device investigated was the Nokia 6110. This features a much larger menu than those investigated previously. The design of the sounds was grounded on actual navigational issues regarding devices with limited visual display.

The results of the evaluation indicate that non-speech sound improves the performance of navigational tasks in terms of the number of errors made and the number of keypresses taken to complete the given tasks. This study provided us with both theoretical and practical insights about the design of audio cues intended to support navigation in complex menu structures.

You can download the sonified mobile phone simulation used in the experiment. The simulation consists of a Java application and a (large) set of wav files packed in a zip file (around 25MB in size). This simulation runs under Windows NT/98 in Java. It contains the relevant Java Runtime Environment, you don't need anything special installed on your system to run it. Please let us know if you use the simulator.

This work was presented at ICAD'2000.

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