A study of 105 university students examined whether the length or type of Auditory Progress Bar (APB) used in a telephone on-hold situation had an impact on users' subjective mental workload. Auditory cues can be designed into APBs to provide information to the caller regarding the approximate duration of the hold time. Previous research has found that the majority of callers tend to multi-task during on-hold situations. Thus the design of any stimuli presented while the caller is on hold should take this into account. To do this, it is important for designers to understand how APB design might impact callers' mental workloads. In the current study, participants experienced one of three APB design types (cello, sine, electronic) in four different lengths (30, 60, 120 and 240 seconds). An on-hold call center experience was simulated using a computer-generated interactive voice response system and workload data was collected using the NASA-TLX. The results of this study indicate that the type of APB does not appear to have a significant impact on callers' assessment of mental workload, but that the duration of the stimuli does.
Auditory Progress Bars (APB) were originally intended to augment Visual Progress Bars (VPB) to create multimodal displays. More recently, APBs have been tested in absence of VPBs for use in the on-hold telephone setting. In this setting, APBs are a viable option for communicating the probable time remaining in the on-hold wait. However, past studies measure the effectiveness of APBs retrospectively, which is appropriate for understanding how accurately callers can judge how long they have been waiting on hold, but is not appropriate for determining if APBs are intuitively communicating the probable time remaining in the wait-which is more relevant to the caller's needs. Here, we measure the effectiveness of 3 distinct APBs prospectively which is more consistent with the caller's concern of how much longer the wait will be before their call is answered. Furthermore, we make APBs more similar to VPBs by playing the APB's endpoint before the APB's beginning point. We found evidence that the accuracy of prospective estimations is a product of APB design, and that the awareness of the endpoint has no affect on the accuracy of prospective estimations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.