Robert Virzi

• Bentley University

Recent guidelines intended for designers of telephone menus for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems advocate keeping menus to four or fewer items. Additional items, the guidelines recommend, should appear on a secondary menu accessible from the first. The current study compared this deep-menu approach to a broad-menu approach wherein all the i...

In two experiments, each using a different product (either a CD-ROM based eleclxonic book or an interactive voice response system), we compared the usability problems uncovered using low- and high-fidelity prototypes. One group of subjects performed a series of tasks using a paperbased low-fidelity prototype, while another performed the same tasks...

Menus, lists, and forms are the workhorse dialogue structures in telephone-based interactive voice response applications. Despite diversity in applications, there is a surprising homogeneity in the menu, list, and form styles commonly employed. There are, however, many alternatives, and no single style fits every prospective application and user po...

A high-fidelity prototype of an extended voice mail application was created. We tested it using three distinct usability testing paradigms so that we could compare the quantity and quality of the information obtained using each. The three methods employed were (1) heuristic evaluation, in which usability experts critique the user interface, (2) thi...

We present the results of a laboratory study comparing three styles of audio menus. One of these styles is the technique predominantly employed in interactive voice response (IVR) systems today. Two alternatives to this Standard technique were evaluated in this study. One of these alternatives was first proposed in Resnick and Virzi (1992), which t...

The current generation of telephone interfaces is frustrating to use, in part because callers have to wait through the recitation of long prompts in order to find the options that interest them. In a visual medium, users would shift their gaze in order to skip uninteresting prompts and scan through large pieces of text. We present skip and scan, a...

Recent attention has been focused on making user interface design less costly and more easily incorporated into the product development life cycle. This paper reports an experiment conducted to determine the minimum number of subjects required for a usability test. It replicates work done by Jakob Nielsen and extends it by incorporating problem imp...

A case is made for using low-fidelity prototypes early in the design phase of new services. The rationale for this is based upon (1) a model of how user interface designs progress and (2) a call to expediency. The design process is viewed as the successive application of constraints that serve to prune the space of all user interfaces. Some constra...

In software engineering the argument in favor of using software tools to produce robust code is widely accepted. We maintain that the use of such tools is key to the engineering of effective user interfaces as well. Here we report on our experiences using a variety of tools to design a user interface, including cases where it was necessary to alter...

Models of the Stroop effect that postulate single, centralized processing stations are fundamentally incorrect. A translational model is proposed in which parallel processing systems are hypothesized that are linked by a translation mechanism. Each system processes information using its own internal code specifically linked to the type of informati...

According to feature-integration theory, when attention is diverted from a display, features from different objects in that display may be wrongly recombined, giving rise to "illusory conjunctions" (Treisman & Schmidt, 1982). Two experiments are reported that examine the nature of these illusory conjunctions. In displays that contain color names an...

It has recently been proposed that in searching for a target defined as a conjunction of two or more separable features, attention must be paid serially to each stimulus in a display. Support for this comes from studies in which subjects searched for a target that shared a single feature with each of two different kinds of distractor items (e.g., a...

This investigation addresses the problem of attention in the processing of symbolic information from visual displays. Its scope includes the nature of attentive processes, the structural properties of stimuli that influence visual information processing mechanisms, and the manner in which these factors interact in perception. Our purpose is to dete...

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