1 User Performance With Audio: The Effect Of Users ’ Cognitive Styles

This work is concerned with the issue of user performance with audio interfaces. We examine how people perform when assigned with simple purely audio tasks. We define 'user performance ' as the ratio of correct score divided by the time to complete the task. A test was devised to examine how the user cognitive style classification is related to user performance when dealing with audio tasks. Performance was significantly different between all tasks except for two cases. Subjects performed best where the level of cognitive demands placed on them were low and prefer questions that use ‘Speech ’ rather than ‘Non-Speech’. Cognitive style was not found to be a significant factor influencing performance where all subjects performed well, but the Verbal-Imagery dimension was found to be a significant factor for the more complex tasks. 2 This paper reports on an experiment that examines how subjects perform in a number of simple tasks using audio. Performance was measured in terms of time taken to answer a series of questions and the number of correct answers scored. There were two main aims for conducting the experiment. The first aim was to identify the relative performance of subjects in all types of task. The second aim was to determin