A Bullseye Menu With Sound Feedback

Standard GUIS today rely heavily on visual feedback. Nonvisual interfaces exist, but are far less common. Many human performance models which involve visual interfaces have been developed, such as Fitts' Law, but far fewer perfomance models have been developed for nonvisual interfaces. This thesis explores some possible rnodels of a nonvisual bullseye menu system. A bullseye menu is a series of concentric circles divided into sectors. We cal1 the region between two neighbouring concentric circles a ring. The category of choice is deterrnined by the direction in which a user moves the stylus or mouse from a relative origin, and menu item selection is detennined by the distance the user moves the stylus from the origin. If a nonvisual signal is emitted whenever the stylus is rolled over a circle, then the menu can be implemented nonvisually. We implemented the interface first with auditory feedback, using a simple beep, and then with tactile feedback, using a mechanism we created for this purpose. This thesis proposes models for performance time in nonvisual bullseye menus. We performed an experirnent to test these models. Results showed Fitts' Law predicted time to target less accurately than a model where performance time is a Iinear function of target's distance. The model was extended to include a representation of the dispersion of the results, in order to provide a more cornplete description of the data. We ran an analysis of variance on the data collected to see whether performance time was influenced by feedback mechanism, ring width, target direction and target ring. Finally, some qualitative results based on user preferences are given.

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