The Role of Modality in Notification Performance

Abstract

Abstract. The primary users of home care technology often have significant sensory impairments. Multimodal interaction can make home care technology more accessible and appropriate, yet most research in the field of multimodal notifications is not aimed at the home but at office or high-pressure environments. This paper presents an experiment that compared the disruptiveness and effectiveness of visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory notifications. The results showed that disruption in the primary task was the same regardless of the notification modality. It was also found that differences in notification effectiveness were due to the inherent traits of a modality, e.g.olfactory notifications were slowest to deliver. The results of this experiment allow researchers and developers to capitalize on the different properties of multimodal techniques, with significant implications for home care technology and technology targeted at users with sensory impairments.

The impact of unwanted multimodal notifications

“…Providing multiple ways to interact can improve accessibility, which has prompted a number of researchers to call for the inclusion of multiple modalities in home care technology [11,19,25]. In addition, researchers have argued that dynamically switching between modalities when appropriate will also lead to increased user acceptability [1,18,30,31]; for example, switching to a more private modality (e.g. tactile) when delivering sensitive information in a social context might be desirable.…”

“…Warnock, McGee-Lennon & Brewster [31] carried out a study into the performance and disruptiveness of visual, audio, tactile and olfactory notifications and found that modality did not affect error or activity rates, but did provide different response accuracies and timings. In their experiment, all of the notifications required a response.…”

“…The task chosen was a simple card-matching game called 'Concentration' (also known as Memory or Pairs), as used by Warnock, McGee-Lennon & Brewster [31]. In concentration, pairs of cards are presented face-down to the player.…”

“…To evaluate the differences between notifications in different modalities, a wide range of unimodal notifications were designed for the experiment based on those used by Warnock, McGee-Lennon & Brewster [31]. These included common notification techniques such as text and speech along with less common notification modalities such as olfaction and abstract visual display.…”

“…A number of researchers have advocated the inclusion of multiple modalities to make such technology more effective and appropriate [1,11,16,18,19,20,31].…”