Making menus musical

Future human-computer interfaces will use more than just graphical output to display information. In this paper we suggest that sound and graphics together can be used to improve interaction. We describe an experiment to improve the usability of standard graphical menus by the addition of sound. One common difficulty is slipping off a menu item by mistake when trying to select it. We designed and experimentally evaluated sonically-enhanced menus to try and overcome this problem. The results from the experiment showed a significant reduction in the subjective effort required to use the new menus along with significantly reduced error recovery times. A significantly larger number of errors were also corrected with sound. KEY WORDS Menus, audio, multi-modal widgets, earcons, sonification.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: INTERACT
• Authors: Stephen A. Brewster, Murray Crease
• Keywords: Future Human-computer Interfaces, INTERACT 1997, INTERACT 2007, Menus, Standard Graphical Menus