ENCODING URGENCY IN LEGACY AUDIO ALERTING SYSTEMS

Despite ongoing modernization efforts, the U.S. Navy expects that it will continue to make highly effective use of legacy systems for many years to come. This and a mandate to maintain fully mission capable platforms have made the service slow to place new audio alerting technologies in command and control environments, despite their demonstrated effectiveness in the laboratory and elsewhere. However, recent upgrade programs for decision support systems have brought with them opportunities to revise and improve standing audio alert techniques. In this paper, the authors describe how the legacy audio component of a Navy decision support workdesk was revised to encode appropriate levels of urgency for incoming action and information alerts. The preliminary design process and issues germane to it are discussed, and the results of an empirical design study are presented. In addition, the implemented solution and the results of a subsequent empirical evaluation are briefly described and discussed.