Auditory display design—An investigation of a design pattern approach

Abstract

We present the evaluation of a methodological design framework that supports expert and novice designers in creating auditory artefacts in human–technology interaction. We first motivate the development of our framework by analysing available guidance and the current practice in the field. Subsequently, we recapitulate on the design of the framework—paco, pattern design in the context space—and present its key concepts and methods. The evaluation of paco aimed to investigate how useful this framework is in a real-world environment. It was conducted in two phases: experts in auditory display design first captured successful designs through paco and created a body of design patterns. These patterns were subsequently used in a controlled experiment with novice designers who were given a design task that forced them to use audio. The results demonstrate that paco has facilitated the transfer of design knowledge and good practice from experts to novices through design patterns. The context space, a key concept in paco, improves the contextual awareness of designers and provides an organising principle for problems, patterns and artefacts. We close by reflecting on the results and discussing future lines of research.

Introduction

The auditory channel in human–technology interaction has received increasing attention as shifting contexts of use and interaction paradigms expose the limits of traditional, vision-dominated computing. Despite our growing knowledge about sonic interaction and promising results in related research, the impact on design practice has been limited. Much of the sound produced by today's technology fails to exploit the sophisticated abilities of human hearing. We aim to address this gap by presenting a methodological framework constructed around design patterns to improve the transfer of design knowledge.

Auditory display—audio as a means to convey information—provides interaction designers with a distinct set of features that effectively extend the available design space. For example, through its flexibility in managing user attention or exploiting the sensitivity to temporal structures. This allows designers to address key challenges in modern interaction design such as the “visual overkill” resulting from the ever growing demand for conveying still more information to users. Auditory displays can help to overcome some limitations by reducing the cognitive load and increasing performance in complex tasks when used in complement to visual displays (Oviatt et al., 2004). Interaction designers also face a whole new era of computing with contexts of use being freed from the traditional desktop environment. Ubiquitous and mobile computing are emerging fields with users requiring eyes-free interfaces, with devices too small to carry a visual display and with environments that make conventional interaction design inappropriate. The exploitation of auditory interaction in these contexts shows great potential (e.g. Brewster, 2002).

Auditory display also plays a key role in making information technology accessible to the visually impaired. The growing impact of technology on our everyday lives makes access to these resources a key factor in being fully integrated and self-dependent. However, despite the rapid development of technology, the means of access has changed very little for visually impaired users over the years, remaining predominantly based on Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems. This inadequacy reflects the more general argument about the limited impact of auditory display on technology we use every day. Mobile phones, portable music players and kitchen appliances incorporate sufficient technology to produce pleasant, functional and informative sounds, but the designs of their interfaces are often limited to simple alarms or speech. We argue that the field of auditory display design could benefit greatly from an efficient means to capture and transfer design knowledge for designers to build on the expertise in the field and apply it in different contexts. By the introduction of a methodological framework for designing auditory display we aim to facilitate this transfer and contribute to the wider use of sound as an efficient means for conveying information.

This article is organised as follows: the subsequent section provides the background to this research including a review of related work and two studies that investigate current practice in auditory display design. The results of these studies informed the design of the paco framework (pattern design in the context space) introduced in Section 3. This is followed by a report on an evaluation study investigating the usefulness of paco in real-world design tasks with novice and expert designers of auditory displays. Section 5 summarises the work and examines the future of this line of research.