Usability Engineering
The human-computer interaction handbook
Using Sound to Communicate Program Execution
EUROMICRO '98 Proceedings of the 24th Conference on EUROMICRO - Volume 2
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
This research investigates the use of multimodal metaphors to communicate information in the interface of an e-government application in order to reduce complexity in the visual communication by incorporating auditory stimuli. These issues are often neglected in the interfaces of e-government applications. This paper investigates the possibility of using multimodal metaphors to enhance the usability and increase the trust between the user and the application using an empirical comparative study. The multimodal metaphors investigated include text, earcons and recorded speech. More specifically, this experiment aims to investigate the usability in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction in the context of a multimodal e-government interface, as opposed to a typical text with graphics based interface. This investigation was evaluated by 30 users and comprised two different interface versions in each experimental e-government tool. The obtained results demonstrated the usefulness of the tested metaphors to enhance e-government usability and to enable users to attain better communicating performance. In addition empirically derived guidelines showed that the use of multimodal metaphors in an e-government system could significantly contribute to enhance the usability and increase trust between a user and an e-government interface. These results provide a paradigm of a design framework for the use of multimodal metaphors in e-government interfaces.