R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Kortum, Philip"

Browsing by Author "Kortum, Philip"

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An Empirical Analysis of Internet Use on Smartphones: Characterizing Visit Patterns and User Differences
(2012-09-05) Tossell, Chad; Kortum, Philip; Byrne, Michael D.; Lane, David M.; Zhong, Lin
The original vision of ubiquitous computing was for computers to assist humans by providing subtle and fitting technologies in every environment. The iPhone and similar smartphones have provided continuous access to the internet to this end. In the current thesis, my goal was to characterize how the internet is used on smartphones to better understand what users do with technology away from the desktop. Naturalistic and longitudinal data were collected from iPhone users in the wild and analyzed to develop this understanding. Since there are two general ways to access the internet on smartphones—via native applications and a web browser—I describe usage patterns through each along with the influence of experience, the nature of the task and physical locations where smartphones were used on these patterns. The results reveal differences between technologies (the PC and the smartphone), platforms (native applications and the mobile browser), and users in how the internet was accessed. Findings indicate that longitudinal use of web browsers decreased sharply with time in favor of native application use, web page revisitation through browsers occurred very infrequently (approximately 25% of URLs are revisited by each user), bookmarks were used sparingly to access web content, physical location visitation followed patterns similar to virtual visitation on the internet, and Zipf distributions characterize mobile internet use. The web browser was not as central to smartphone use compared to the PC, but afforded certain types of activities such as searching and ad hoc browsing. In addition, users systematically differed from each other in how they accessed the internet suggesting different ways to support a wider spectrum of smartphone users.
Avoid equipment graveyards: rigorous process to improve identification and procurement of effective, affordable, and usable newborn devices in low-resource hospital settings
(Springer Nature, 2023) Asma, Elizabeth; Heenan, Megan; Banda, George; Kirby, Rebecca P.; Mangwiro, Lucky; Acemyan, Claudia Ziegler; Palamountain, Kara M.; Kortum, Philip; Kawaza, Kondwani; Oden, Z. Maria; Richards-Kortum, Rebecca; Brandt, Alexsandra; Kumara, Danica; Jin, Li; Khalid, Ali; Osoo, Cliff; Bisceglia, Nicki; Gate, Vince; Valle, Maureen; Mjumira, Rowland; Chapin, Abby; Shapiro, Alyssa; Samuel, Christina; Kimmey, David; Belton, M. Grant; Wang, Yifan Jack; Johnston, Jake; Anderson, Jessica; Bailey, Joseph; Coyle, Josh; Gordon, Kaede; Weld, Madeleine Tadros; Bond, Meaghan; Mitchell, Natalie; Mobarhan, Sara Liaghati; Salter, Sarah Elina; Matin, Shababa B.; Saenz, Sonia E. Sosa; Kalikoff, Sylvie; Boles, Taylor; Technical Collaborative Authorship Group; Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies
Millions of newborns die annually from preventable causes, with the highest rates occurring in Africa. Reducing neonatal mortality requires investment to scale hospital care, which includes providing hospitals with appropriate technology to care for small and sick newborns. Expensive medical devices designed for high-resource settings often fail to withstand conditions in low-resource hospitals, including humidity, dust, frequent user turnover, complex maintenance, lack of stable power, or difficulty sourcing expensive consumables. Rigorous evaluation protocols are needed to identify effective, affordable, rugged, and easy-to-use medical devices appropriate for quality hospital-based newborn care in low-resource hospitals.
Benefits of a physician-facing tablet presentation of patient symptom data: comparing paper and electronic formats
(BioMed Central, 2013) Glaser, Daniel; Jain, Sanjula; Kortum, Philip
Background: Providing patient information to physicians in usable form is of high importance. Electronic presentation of patient data may have benefits in efficiency and error rate reduction for these physician facing interfaces. Using a cancer symptom measurement tool (the MD Anderson Symptom Inventory (MDASI)) we assessed the usability of patient data in its raw paper form and compared that to presentation on two electronic presentation formats of different sizes. Methods: In two separate experiments, undergraduates completed two identical six-part questionnaires on two twenty-patient MDASI data sets. In Experiment 1, participants completed one questionnaire using a paper packet and the other questionnaire using an in-house designed iPad application. In Experiment 2, MDASI data was evaluated using an iPad and iPod Touch. Participants assessed the usability of the devices directly after use. In a third experiment, medical professionals evaluated the paper and iPad interfaces in order to validate the findings from Experiment 1. Results: Participants were faster and more accurate answering questions about patients when using the iPad. The results from the medical professionals were similar. No appreciable accuracy, task time, or usability differences were observed between the iPad and iPod Touch. Conclusions: Overall, the use of our tablet interface increased the accuracy and speed that users could extract pertinent information from a multiple patient MDASI data set compared to paper. Reducing the size of the interface did not negatively affect accuracy, speed, or usability. Generalization of the results to other physician facing interfaces is discussed.
CHILVote: The design and assessment of an accessible audio voting system
(2013-09-16) Piner, Gillian E.; Byrne, Michael D.; Kortum, Philip; Lane, David M.; Wallach, Dan S.
The Help America Vote Act, passed into law in 2002, mandated that all polling places provide privacy and independence to all voters. Given this, many jurisdictions have been forced into making a choice between providing traditional voting methods (such as paper ballots) and offering newer electronic voting systems. Electronic voting machines have been seen as the solution to many usability and accessibility problems, but very little literature exists to indicate whether this is the case among speciﬁc populations such as disabled, elderly, and non-English speaking voters. An audio accessible voting interface for visually disabled voters (CHILVote) was designed using speciﬁcations from both the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines and a largescale survey of blind individuals conducted by Piner and Byrne [in proceedings of The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 55th Annual Meeting, pp. 1686-1690 (2011)]. CHILVote’s interface utilizes the given design guidelines and includes use of a male text-to-speech voice, a ﬂexible navigation structure, adjustable speed and volume, and an optional review section. Relatively low error rates (M=1.7%) and high SUS scores (M=89.5) among blind subjects are consistent with previous ﬁndings. Error rates and satisfaction are not signiﬁcantly different than those of sighted voters using both paper and DRE, and blind voters using a non-electronic interface. CHILVote signiﬁcantly reduced the time it takes for blind subjects to vote, from 25.2 minutes (VotePAD) to 17.1 minutes (CHILVote). This is an improvement, but still over 2.5 times slower than sighted subjects voting on an identical ballot. The integration of accessibility into mainstream technology often has beneﬁts beyond allowing more of the population access to a system. This research provides a comparison point and guidelines for future studies of accessibility solutions.
Context in Mobile System Design: Characterization, Theory, and Implications
(2012-09-05) Rahmati, Ahmad; Zhong, Lin; Knightly, Edward W.; Sabharwal, Ashutosh; Kortum, Philip
Context information brings new opportunities for efficient and effective applications and services on mobile devices. Many existing work exploit the context dependency of mobile usage for specific applications, and show significant, quantified, performance gains by utilizing context. In order to be practical, such works often pay careful attention to the energy and processing costs of context awareness while attempting to maintain reasonable accuracy. These works also have to deal with the challenges of multiple sources of context, which can lead to a sparse training data set. Even with the abundance of such work, quantifying context-dependency and the relationship between context-dependency and performance achievements remains an open problem, and solutions to manage the and challenges of context awareness remain ad-hoc. To this end, this dissertation methodologically quantifies and measures the context dependency of three principal types of mobile usage in a methodological, application agnostic yet practical manner. The three usages are the websites the user visits, the phone numbers they call, and the apps they use, either built-in or obtained by the user from the App Store . While this dissertation measures the context dependency of these three principal types of mobile usage, its methodology can be readily extended to other context-dependent mobile usage and system resources. This dissertation further presents SmartContext, a framework to systematically optimize the energy cost of context awareness by selecting among different context sources, while satisfying the system designer’s cost-accuracy tradeoffs. Finally, this thesis investigates the collective effect of social context on mobile usage, by separating and comparing LiveLab users based on their socioeconomic groups. The analysis and findings are based on usage and context traces collected in real-life settings from 24 iPhone users over a period of one year. This dissertation presents findings regarding the context dependency of three principal types of mobile usage; visited websites, phone calls, and app usage. The methodology and lessons presented here can be readily extended to other forms of context and context-dependent usage and resources. They guide the development of context aware systems, and highlight the challenges and expectations regarding the context dependency of mobile usage.
Deploying Usability: Ensuring Trust in Electronic Voting for Military Absentee Voters
(2024-11-13) Kim, Nessa; Kortum, Philip; Byrne, Michael
U.S. uniformed service members deployed overseas face unique challenges in exercising their right to vote, often showing lower voter confidence due to difficulties in updating registration, requesting absentee ballots, and meeting tight voting deadlines. The current research evaluated the usability and trustworthiness of “CACvote,” an absentee voting system designed to enhance voting access and security for military personnel. CACvote allows voters to instantly request ballots and verify the legitimacy of their mail-in votes using secure authentication. Through a series of three experiments, the research sought to determine whether military voters find CACvote intuitive and trustworthy. First, a baseline experiment was conducted to establish usability and trust metrics with eligible military voters for a traditional electronic voting system (“Baseline”), simulating the core functions of electronic ballot-marking. Building on this model and insights from the experiment, a second formative experiment explored how additional features of the user interface—including support for authentication, ballot verification, and secure mailing processes—impact usability and trust. These findings informed subsequent system iterations. Finally, the third experiment evaluated the refined voting system’s overall usability and trustworthiness with military voters. CACvote demonstrated increased vote-casting rates and reduced assistance requests compared to the Baseline system, while maintaining similarly high levels of user satisfaction and trustworthiness. No significant differences were found in perceived workload or satisfaction between the two systems, suggesting that CACvote’s novel features integrate effectively with traditional electronic voting methods. This research also explored the relationship between trust and voting system usability, highlighting the distinct roles of past voting experience and perceived workload in shaping the voter’s trust in the voting system. These findings contribute to the exploration of how voting system usability influences voter confidence, highlighting the role of trust as a key indicator of usable security.
Direct Learning for Time-to-Collision Judgments of Approaching Objects: The Role of Fractal 1/f Noise in Exploration
(2020-04-14) Braly, Adam M; DeLucia, Patricia R; Kortum, Philip; Lane, David M; Sano, Akane
The purpose of this dissertation was to determine whether direct learning can improve time-to-collision (TTC) judgments of approaching objects. Accurate information for judgments of TTC is available in the optic array, but research has shown that observers do not always use this accurate information. Even though this information exists in the optic array, observers may not be attuned to use such information. According to direct learning theory, observers must be able to flexibly combine exploration and feedback to calibrate their judgments. This could explain why prior studies found that observers relied on other less reliably accurate sources of information. Research has also shown that fractal fluctuations in exploration involve fluctuations at all time scales, which ostensibly allows perceptual systems the flexibility to detect information. Therefore, fractal fluctuations in exploration may reflect coordination among detection, calibration, and attunement of information for perception or action. This dissertation tested whether judgments of TTC were significantly better when participants were permitted to make exploratory movements with feedback compared to when they were restricted and not given feedback. In a virtual environment, participants viewed scenes of an object that approached them. After a designated time, the object disappeared and participants judged when the object would have reached them, had it continued to move. Exploration and feedback were factorially crossed to create four between-subjects conditions of Exploration- Feedback, Exploration- No Feedback, No Exploration- Feedback, and No Exploration- No Feedback. Results showed that participants in the Exploration- Feedback learned to used more accurate information for their judgments and this improvement was retained in the absence of further feedback. Participants in the No Exploration- Feedback appeared to learn how to use accurate information, but in the absence of further feedback their performance degraded, suggesting a strategy based on feedback rather than learning. Results of fractal analyses revealed that exploratory movements were fractal, and that trail-by-trial fluctuations in the fractal scaling exponent predicted perceptual error. The findings have implications for theories of TTC perception and practical implications are discussed.
Evaluation of Home Health Care Devices: Remote Usability Assessment
(JMIR Publications Inc., 2015) Kortum, Philip; Peres, S. Camille
Background: An increasing amount of health care is now performed in a home setting, away from the hospital. While there is growing anecdotal evidence about the difficulty patients and caregivers have using increasingly complex health care devices in the home, there has been little systematic scientific study to quantify the global nature of home health care device usability in the field. Research has tended to focus on a handful of devices, making it difficult to gain a broad view of the usability of home-care devices in general. Objective: The objective of this paper is to describe a remote usability assessment method using the System Usability Scale (SUS), and to report on the usability of a broad range of health care devices using this metric. Methods: A total of 271 participants selected and rated up to 10 home health care devices of their choice using the SUS, which scores usability from 0 (unusable) to 100 (highly usable). Participants rated a total of 455 devices in their own home without an experimenter present. Results: Usability scores ranged from 98 (oxygen masks) to 59 (home hormone test kits). An analysis conducted on devices that had at least 10 ratings showed that the effect of device on SUS scores was significant (P<.001), and that the usability of these devices was on the low end when compared with other commonly used items in the home, such as microwave ovens and telephones. Conclusions: A large database of usability scores for home health care devices collected using this remote methodology would be beneficial for physicians, patients, and their caregivers.
From Error to Error: Why Voters Could not Cast a Ballot and Verify Their Vote With Helios, Prêt à Voter, and Scantegrity II
(USENIX, 2015) Acemyan, Claudia Z.; Kortum, Philip; Byrne, Michael D.; Wallach, Dan S.
The aim of this paper is to identify user errors, and the related potential design deficiencies, that contributed to participants failing to vote cast and vote verify across three end-to-end voting systems: Helios, Prêt à Voter, and Scantegrity II. To understand why voters could not cast a vote 42% of the time and verify that their ballots were cast and counted with the tested e2e systems 53% of the time, we reviewed data collected during a system usability study. An analysis of the findings revealed subjects were most often not able to vote with Helios because they did not log in after encrypting their ballot but before casting it. For both Prêt à Voter and Scantegrity II, failing to vote was most frequently attributed to not scanning the completed ballot. Across all three systems, the most common reason participants did not verify their vote was due to not casting a ballot in the first place. While there were numerous usability failures identified in the study, these errors can likely be designed out of the systems. This formative information can be used to avoid making the same types of mistakes in the next generation of voting systems—ultimately resulting in more usable e2e methods.
Getting Real: A Naturalistic Methodology for Using Smartphones to Collect Mediated Communications
(Hindawi Publishing Corporation, 2012) Tossell, Chad C.; Kortum, Philip; Shepard, Clayton W.; Rahmati, Ahmad; Zhong, Lin
This paper contributes an intentionally naturalistic methodology using smartphone logging technology to study communications in the wild. Smartphone logging can provide tremendous access to communications data from real environments. However, researchers must consider how it is employed to preserve naturalistic behaviors. Nine considerations are presented to this end. We also provide a description of a naturalistic logging approach that has been applied successfully to collecting mediated communications from iPhones. The methodology was designed to intentionally decrease reactivity and resulted in data that were more accurate than self-reports. Example analyses are also provided to show how data collected can be analyzed to establish empirical patterns and identify user differences. Smartphone logging technologies offer flexible capabilities to enhance access to real communications data, but methodologies employing these techniques must be designed appropriately to avoid provoking naturally occurring behaviors. Functionally, this methodology can be applied to establish empirical patterns and test specific hypotheses within the field of HCI research. Topically, this methodology can be applied to domains interested in understanding mediated communications such as mobile content and systems design, teamwork, and social networks.
Measuring Subjective Usability by Watching Others Use the Product
(2021-12-03) Shanklin, Roslyn Ayanna; Kortum, Philip
The COVID-19 pandemic instituted a new norm for usability practitioners and researchers by limiting their ability to safely conduct in-person, contact-intensive usability testing protocols. This study explored one promising remote usability assessment method, Watching Others Using Video, wherein users watch videos of others using a product and then rate its usability. Previous studies found that this method results in inflated usability ratings. This study sought to mitigate this inflation by showing users different levels of product use difficulty. Participants watched videos of several products being used: a website, a digital timer, and an electric can opener; and rated them with the System Usability Scale and After-Scenario Questionnaire. Usability score inflation was consistent across products. Participants may not have reliably detected the portrayals of difficulty. Alternatively, the error severities may have been negligible. Further research is needed to understand how Watching Others Using Video can be accurately used for usability testing.
Measuring Usability by Watching Others With Directed Attention and Curated Instruction
(2023-08-09) Shanklin, Roslyn Ayanna; Kortum, Philip
Usability assessment is an important part of the product design process that helps ensure people can easily use a product to accomplish their goals. There are several well developed usability assessment methods, but a need exists for remotely testing physical products. Watching Others Using Video (WOUV) is a potential remote testing solution, wherein people watch videos of another person using a product and then rate its usability. However, previous studies have shown that this method yields inflated usability scores compared to in-person testing. The purpose of this dissertation was to increase the accuracy of Watching Others Using Video and assess how it can best be used as a viable usability scoring and comparison tool. To this end, the current research adapted WOUV to increase the viewer’s acquisition of information critical to accurate usability assessment, as important details may be missed through video. The first experiment established a diverse product selection which was used to evaluate the WOUV adaptations. A second experiment evaluated visually directed attention adaptations of WOUV, which highlighted and explained experience information in several product interactions (e.g., success, error recovery, and failure). The third experiment assessed instructional adaptations of WOUV, which showed how to use a product and demonstrated errors with explanation. For both WOUV adaptation experiments, participants watched videos of several products being used and rated them with the System Usability Scale. The results showed comparable usability ratings between WOUV adaptations and in-person testing for several products when adequate information was provided (i.e., showing and describing errors), but significant score inflation for products with low usability. WOUV adaptations did not reliably maintain relative differences between products compared to in-person testing, though rank order comparison was supported. Practical implications and future directions of Watching Others Using Video are discussed.
Modeling Curved Movement
(2013-09-16) Gallagher, Melissa; Byrne, Michael D.; Kortum, Philip; Pomerantz, James R.
This work aims to further the understanding of the trajectory and velocity profile of curved motion. Two competing theories, the two-thirds power law and the minimum jerk velocity profile, were tested. A set of two experiments was run that had the subjects generate curved motion. The first experiment had subjects move along a bounded oval and the second experiment had subjects move is a less constrained manner inducing a curved path. The study shows evidence for the expected effects of distance travel and allowable room for error. The evidence for the two movement profiles explaining the data is minimal.
Modeling Password Entry on Mobile Devices: Please Check Your Password and Try Again
(2015-04-21) Gallagher, Melissa Ann; Byrne, Michael D; Kortum, Philip; O'Malley, Marcia; Lane, David M
Despite being recognized as a fundamentally flawed system, password authentication is a widely deployed security feature on desktop and mobile systems. Inputting complex passwords on mobile devices can be an onerous task. The composition of the passwords creates a unique challenge for people to input as not all characters are displayed on the keyboard at the same time, forcing the user to switch between multiple screens. While previous studies of text input on mobile devices have focused on typing words and phrases, little work has been done examining the effects screen switching has on text input. Three experiments were conducted in which subjects typed strings similar to secure passwords. Subjects were considerably slower typing password-like strings than typing standard text. Uncertainty about the location of symbols was a key factor in this slowdown. One of the largest contributors to the number of errors made was the size of the keyboard keys. This source of error suggests technologies that may aid error prevention. The results from these studies informed an ACT-R model of the task. The timing data generated from the model fits the experimental results well. The strategy that the model employs depends on the type of character it is trying to input providing further evidence that finding and inputting symbols decreases speed. Validated models of password input on mobile devices can aid designers in usability testing new password policies. The results have implications for both usability and security of password input on mobile devices.
The Development and Initial Validation of the Trust in Self-Driving Vehicles Scale (TSDV)
(2021-04-28) Robertson, Ian; Kortum, Philip
Automated vehicles are an emerging technology in which consumers have low levels of trust. Researchers and designers can understand and improve consumer trust through research but doing so effectively requires the reliable measurement of trust. Although general trust-in-automation measures exist, a psychometrically well-developed measure specific to self-driving vehicles would be a substantial improvement. The purpose of this dissertation was to address that need. Candidate items were created after a thorough literature review and then refined through expert feedback in two steps. Preliminary item groups were identified via an open card sort; the resulting relationship between items and groups were used to initially refine the item pool. A closed sort was then conducted to follow up on the results from the first study and further refine the item pool. Based on the results of the closed sort, a final item pool was generated by rewording items and generating content for facets of trust that were identified as having too few items. This final group of items were given to 400 participants who rated their trust in riding in a self-driving vehicle, as portrayed in a narrative. The Trust in Self-driving Vehicles Scale (TSDV) was created by analyzing participants’ responses via psychometric methods. Four reliable and interpretable factors were extracted from participants’ responses. Five items were retained for each factor to create the TSDV. The validity of the instrument is evidenced by the TSDV’s ability to discriminate between a trustworthy and non-trustworthy vehicle, as portrayed in scenarios in the scale development sample, a replication sample, and a video-based validity study. Application of the TSDV was demonstrated by comparing how presentation modalities (VR headset versus computer monitor) may affect trust ratings. Additionally, the TSDV was used in an exploratory vignette study to evaluate how knowledge that a cyberattack was carried out on an AV impacts users’ trust in the vehicle. Future directions and applications of the TSDV are discussed.
The Effect of Response Modality on Task Performance When Using an Interactive Voice Response System for Older and Younger Adults
(2013-04-18) Howie, Nicole; Byrne, Michael D.; Logan, Jessica; Kortum, Philip
The purpose of this experiment was to gain a greater understanding of how set- level compatibility affects task performance of older adults while using an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System. Set-level compatibility effects occur when differences in response time are obtained due to characteristics shared between a stimulus and response set. The current study used banking and healthcare IVR tasks to investigate whether manipulating set-level compatibility would differentially affect performance between younger (18 - 39 years old) and older (65 years and older) adults. As expected, subjects performed better in the high set-level compatibility conditions. However, no interaction between set-level compatibility and age was found, which can possibly be attributed to task differences, IVR design and real world context of the task. Overall, the primary contributions of this research are the design guidelines that were created to develop an IVR that suppressed age effects.
The effect of secondary tasks and stimulus type on ratings of telephone hold workload
(2011) Su, Andy; Kortum, Philip
Auditory progress bars (APBs) are aural stimuli designed to convey time progression. To investigate the relationship of APBs and workload ratings during a telephone holding context, two APBs were tested alongside ethnographically-validated caller secondary behaviors in a multitasking procedure. Predictions based on Multiple Resources Theory were found to be absent or in the opposite direction, in that an electronic musical APB was rated higher than a voice-based APB in workload as measured by NASA-TLX and task performance. Differences between APBs were manifest through both overall workload ratings and NASA-TLX subcomponent scores. Results indicate that workload measurement can be noisy, particularly when task demands are low to moderate, and that the small effect of APB type may be less important than other considerations for APB design.
The Generalizability of Cognitive Modeling Parameters
(2015-07-06) Howie, Nicole; Byrne, Michael; O'Malley, Marcia; Kortum, Philip
Increased awareness of the importance of usability has stemmed from the realization that customer satisfaction and revenue generation are affected by usability. One method that can be used to evaluate usability is cognitive modeling, which can make quantitative predictions about human performance across different tasks and devices. However, it is unclear if cognitive models can accurately predict older adult performance. Trewin et al. (2012) proposed that parameters used in models for older adults may have to be specific to a task and/or device. The purpose of this research was to determine if task and/or device type must be accounted for in parameters used to model older adult performance in a cognitive architecture. Jastrzembski and Charness (2007) estimated architectural parameters for older adults and were able to successfully predict performance of tasks performed with a mobile phone. The current study investigated if these parameters generalize to different tasks and devices. In the experiment, older (70 years and above) and younger (18 - 39 years old) adults performed two tasks with two different devices. Overall, the results from the behavioral data showed that older adults performed more slowly than younger adults, however older adult’s performance varied across task. Performance differences between older and younger adults due to device were caused by strategy differences. Cognitive models of each task with one device were created using modeling parameters that represented older and younger adults. Then the behavioral data were compared to the models. The models were mainly slower than older and younger adults across each task. The results helped provide evidence that task and/or device type are important and should be incorporated into modeling parameters. However, strategy must be accounted for as well in order to accurately model older adult performance.
The impact of Feedback Tone, Grammatical Person and Presentation Mode on Performance and Preference in a Computer-based Learning Task.
(2013-09-16) Thomas, Sebastian; Lane, David M.; Byrne, Michael D.; Kortum, Philip; Napier, Albert
Politeness is a part of student-tutor interactions and research in affective computing has shown that this social convention may also be applicable when a computer plays the role of tutor. This study sought to build on previous work that examined the effect of the politeness of computer feedback through the application of social and cognitive theories. Employing a mixed-factor design, a sample of 150 college students completed a multiple cue probability learning task (MCPL) on a computer that provided feedback phrased in one of three different tonal styles (joint-goal, student-goal and baldon- record). Feedback tone was a within-subjects factor. Subjects received feedback as either text or as audio. Audio feedback was a between-subjects factor and was delivered in one of four different modes male/female human voice or a male/female synthesized voice. The study found gender differences in tone preference as well as a possible impact of the Tone x Mode interaction on learning. Specifically, men were more likely than women to prefer the student-goal style feedback prompts. It is hoped that this research can provide additional insight to designers of learning applications when they are designing the feedback mechanisms that these systems should employ.
The impact of voice characteristics on user response in an interactive voice response system
(2009) Evans, Rochelle E.; Kortum, Philip
System voice within interactive voice response systems (IVRs) was investigated. Specifically, users were randomly assigned a system voice personality (upbeat, professional, and sympathetic) and voice gender (male and female) when completing a health survey over IVR. Disclosure rates were not affected by the type of voice heard, nor did they differ by user gender. Additionally, disclosure was higher on the IVR version of the health survey than on a web-based version, further recognizing the privacy offered by IVRs.

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