What do I want to know?

Before starting the user studies and going into deeper organisation and prototyping, it is the most important thing to make clear what one wants to know and what the desired knowledge is, that is supposed to alight from these studies. During a quick brainstorm, these were the initial questions and metrics of interest, that could be monitored and evaluated during those studies:

The User's

• performance 
• action
• reaction 
• monitoring bandwidth 

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• while executing an unrelated task
• for different use cases/"data-stories"
• for different sound design approaches

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• get user experience feedback on 
• fatigue
• transition
• notification level
• disturbance
• annoyance

The Sonification Handbook mentions a lot of areas that still lack documented researching. The following paragraphs are the ones that seemed mostly related to the thesis:

Chapter 2
Theory of Sonification
Bruce N. Walker and Michael A. Nees

"Surprisingly few studies to date have considered how the addition of a secondary task affects performance with sonifications." (Page 21)

"The successful deployment of sonifications in real-world settings will require a more solid base of knowledge regarding these issues." (Page 22)

"Researchers have only scratched the surface of possible context cues and their configurations, and we need to implement and validate other, perhaps more effective, methods (see, e.g., Nees & Walker, 2006)." (Page 26)

Chapter 14
Earcons
David McGookin and Stephen Brewster

"Similar studies [20] have been carried out on progress bars (...), where the user may wish to remain aware of an ongoing operation but not constantly visually monitor it. Beaudouin-Lafon and Conversey [4] proposed the use of Sheppard-Risset tones for auditory progress bars. (...) Unfortunately, Beaudouin-Lafon and Conversey did not evaluate their technique." (Page 353)

Chapter 18
Sonification for Process Monitoring
Paul Vickers

In all, four ecologies were constructed:

1. Voice world— vocal speech labels;

1. Sound effects world— beach noises: an auditory icon/soundscape set;

1. Music world— tonal musical motifs: a structured earcon set;

1. Rich world— a composite set of musical motifs, sound effects, and vocal messages.

Unfortunately, no formal studies have been published to discover how well the ecologies worked and which of the four was better received by users. (Page 479)

Obviously, not all research suggestions can be executed during the user studies. The major focus will lie on measuring the performance of sonification during a secondary task, also in comparison or addition the visual input. How context cues can be transported and comparing different ways through various sound design approaches will also be investigated. In that context, looking at the use of Sheppard-Risset tones to communicate statuses of processes will be evaluated. The observation of a sonification tool in a live working environment will not be part of the initial user studies. It is however still planned during later studies as part of this thesis. Investigating different ecologies as suggested in the "sonification for Process Monitoring" chapter will not be part of the user studies.

In conclusion, below are the metrics and topics that will be investigated during the user studies:

• comparing performance, action, reaction and monitoring bandwidth with a sonification prototype for process monitoring while executing a second task (for different "data scenarios") in comparison to visual only approaches
• investigating the use of different possibilities to transport context through sound (Sheppard-Risset tones a.o.)
• Interview after user study to get detailed user feedback (fatigue, transition, notification level, disturbance, annoyance)