Usability inspection for sonification applications

Bonification is the representation of data using mainly non-speech sound for the
purpose of communication and interpretation. The process and technique of
converting the data into sound is called the sonification technique. One or more
techniques might be required by a sonification application. However, sonification
techniques are not generally suitable for all kinds of data, and often custom
techniques are used - where the design is tailored to the domain and nature of the
data as well as the users' required tasks within the application. Therefore, it is
important to assure the usability of the technique for the specific domain
application being developed.
In previously reported research, most designers of sonification applications have
needed to develop at least a prototype for user testing. The result are interpreted
and analysed to look for potential problems and solutions to improve the design.
This dissertation has developed a new systematic usability inspection approach
called the Task Interpretation Walkthrough (TIW) for the design of sonification
application before they go to the initial development phase. It is hypothesized that
designers of sonification applications will be able to detect significantly more
important potential usability problems before the implementation phase by
analysing the interaction between the user and the application as well as paying
attention to the different stages of how the data is transformed into sound. It uses
two new models - the Sonification Application (SA) model and the User
Interpretation Construction (UIC) model.
Four experiments with human subjects were carried out to study the feasibility and
effectiveness of Task Interpretation Walkthrough inspection by comparing it
against two widely used techniques; Heuristic Evaluation and Cognitive
Walkthrough. The sonification designs being inspected were a Mobile Phone
Joystick Text-Entry with Sound (Experiments I and II), a Diagnosis Tool for
Analysis of The Motion and Usage of a Patient's Arm (Experiment III); and an
Audio-Visual Analysis Tool of Cervical Sample Slides (Experiment IV). The
participants included sound researchers (Experiment II); and students with a
background in music technology and software engineering (Experiments I, III and
IV), acting either individually or in 2-person groups. The results have shown that
the research hypothesis is supported, where the significantly important usability
problems were able to be detected before the implementation phase. From the
inspection method comparison study, results showed the Task Interpretation
Walkthrough to be more effective than the existing techniques (Heuristic
Evaluation and Cognitive Walkthrough).