Hello Jerome! In stead of theory here are some findings from projects.. For the last two years I've been working on two separate mobility (PDA) concepts, both where sound came to be a challenge.
One of them is an application for security guards, where sound discipline is critical. Walking around alone at night trying to pay attention to everything without being seen, you can't have a PDA in your belt beeping away for every incoming message. But some messages are critical and urgent - and that was the challenge. After some thinking and experimenting we found that the length of the sound was the best way to divert between critical and not so critical messages. It was partly based on a suggestion that low volume sounds are hard to recognise from each other. But the most important idea was that - without any training up front - a longer sound intuitively should "feel" more important than a short one. ..together with vibration of course.. And usability tests confirmed the idea - it worked! For the other project the challenge is the oposite. Logistic workers, outdoors at a huge an very noisy industrial plant. The interesting part here is this: These guys are wearing professional ear protection, even with noise reduction. And with huge trucks and mobile cranes constantly roaring by, vibration doesn't work. This led us to a cool experiment with pitch rather than volume or pattern (melody). We're not finished yet but some inital testing suggests that we're on to some effective sounds that are able to penetrate those ear protections. Hope this was somewhat useful to you, Jerome. Any similar projects anyone? While I'm at it - is there anyone here who have some experience with the DEXTERRA mobility software? Regards Frank Dahle UX concept developer Oslo/Norway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=37774 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
