Patterns in Auditory Menu Design

The design of auditory displays suffers from the lack of re-usable design knowledge, leading to ad-hoc solutions and inappropriate use of sound in human-computer interaction. We propose to tackle this problem by employing design patterns to capture design knowledge and make it available for designers of auditory displays to share and re-use solutions. In this paper we describe how we designed auditory menus by using design patterns which were developed for a prior prototype and refined according to the results of the prior evaluation test. The resulting auditory display employs 3D virtual audio environments with concurrent audio streams and was tested against state-of-the-art screenreader technology. The evaluation showed that flaws identified in the prior prototype were eliminated, but despite the improved naturalness the performance was only marginally better than with the screenreader. The patterns originated from graphical pattern sets and the auditory design is still an ad-hoc solution. The requirements for a general framework to capture good practice, coding of valid design knowledge and applying patterns to design problems are discussed.