Tactile displays are now becoming available in a form that can be easily used in a user interface. This paper describes a new form of tactile output. Tactons, or tactile icons, are structured, abstract messages that can be used to communicate messages non-visually. A range of different parameters can be used for Tacton construction including: frequency, amplitude and duration of a tactile pulse, plus other parameters such as rhythm and location. Tactons have the potential to improve interaction in a range of different areas, particularly where the visual display is overloaded, limited in size or not available, such as interfaces for blind people or in mobile and wearable devices. This paper

Haptic devices are now commercially available and thus touch has become a potentially realistic solution to a variety of interaction design challenges. We report on an investigation of the use of touch as a way of reducing visual overload in the conventional desktop. In a two-phase study, we investigated the use of the PHANToM haptic device as a means of interacting with a conventional graphical user interface. The first experiment compared the effects of four different haptic augmentations on usability in a simple targeting task. The second experiment involved a more ecologically-oriented searching and scrolling task. Results indicated that the haptic effects did not improve users performance in terms of task completion time. However, the number of errors made was significantly reduced. Subjective workload measures showed that participants perceived many aspects of workload as significantly less with haptics. The results are described and the implications for the use of haptics in user interface design are discussed.

Our work addresses problem of (visual) clutter in mobile device interfaces. The solution we propose involves the translation of techniques- from the graphical to the audio domain- for exploiting space in information representation. This article presents an illustrative example in the form of a spatialized audio progress bar. In usability tests, participants performed background monitoring tasks significantly more accurately using this spatialized audio (vs. a conventional visual) progress bar. Moreover, their performance in a simultaneously running, visually demanding foreground task was significantly improved in the eyes-free monitoring condition. These results have important implications for the design of multi-tasking interfaces for mobile devices. 1

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Although most of us communicate using multiple sensory modalities in our lives, and many of our computers are similarly capable of multi-modal interaction, most human-computer interaction is predominantly in the visual mode. This paper describes a toolkit of widgets that are capable of presenting themselves in multiple modalities, but further are capable of adapting their presentation to suit the contexts and environments in which they are used. This is of increasing importance as the use of mobile devices becomes ubiquitous.

The aim of this project was to create a software library or framework that would assist developers in writing “mobile-fixed ” applications incorporating multimodal feedback. “mobile-fixed ” is intended to describe applications that consist of two separate components, one running on a fixed, desktop PC, and another running on a mobile device, such as a PDA. Developers of such applications would typically be required to implement networking, audio, and tactile functionality, and interface with various types of peripherals (for example, accelerometers). By making this functionality available in a single place, it was hoped that developers would be able to reduce the time they spent on these common tasks, and focus on the more novel aspects of their applications, such as interface or interaction design. i Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people: • My supervisor, Roderick Murray-Smith, for his suggestions, ideas, and comments throughout the course of the project.

This paper presents a review of the research surrounding the paper “The Design and Evaluation of a Sonically-Enhanced Tool Palette ” by

1 Introduction and a brief history of non-speech sound and HCI.............................................. 2 2 Why use non-speech sound in human-computer interfaces?.................................................. 5 2.1 Some advantages of sound............................................................................................ 5 2.2 Some problems with sound........................................................................................... 7