USING NON-SPEECH SOUND TO OVERCOME INFORMATION OVERLOAD

With ever increasing amounts of visual information to take in when int eracting with computers, users can become overloaded. One reason is th at computers communicate solely by graphical output. This paper sugges ts 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 eac h offers. The approach described here is to integrate sound into the b asic components of the human-computer interface. Two experiments are d escribed 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 al so showed a significant reduction. Results from this work show that th e integrated display of graphical and auditory information can overcom e information overload. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.