An Empirical Study of Dual-Modal Information Presentation

Dual-modal interfaces with both visual and auditory output are becoming important, especially for applications using smallscreen displays and for user access under mobile conditions. Our research investigated the effectiveness and feasibility of a dual-modal information presentation, “Visual + Auditory”. Based on the multiple-resource human attention model (Wickens, 1980, 1984), this study hypothesizes that additional auditory information presented during a web browsing process can be perceived by users and will not negatively impact users’ performance on the browsing task. A controlled experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis. Display mode was the independent variable, and the two treatments were regular visual display and visual plus auditory. The dependent variables were user satisfaction and user task performance. The hypothesis was fully supported by the experiment. The findings suggest that users can perceive auditory information while visually browsing textual information.