Abstract
This paper describes the experiment that investigated the possibility of design and evaluation of the usability of earcon applied to voice menu. The earcon has functions in providing navigational cue in the hierarchical menu, and also can be applied to voice menu for improving the recall rate and the response time. In this experiment, participants identified their location with the help of earcon applied to the voice menu with the various earcon parameters. In detail some participants listened to the good quality sound of voice menu using the structured earcon, and they recalled the location they heard. Other participants listened to the good quality sound of voice menu without earcon, and they recalled the location they heard in the same manner. And the response times were checked through their answers. On analyzing the results, we found the earcon applied to voice menu showed the increase of recalling rate from what they heard during experiment. That is the performance of task was better with earcon applied to voice menu than with voice menu without earcon. In the earcon applied to voice menu test, it showed the accuracy of 92.50%, but in voice menu without earcon test, people could only recall 66.25% among given questions. The response time was reduced from 4.98 sec to 3.85 sec. In addition, this experiment showed the 87.5% of participants preferred the earcon applied to voice menu.