Usability Evaluation of a Spoken DataEntry Interface”, ITCIrst Centro per la Ricera Scie.pdfVIP

Usability Evaluation of a Spoken Data-Entry Interface Marcello Federico ITC-Irst - Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica I-38050 Povo, Trento, Italy. federico@irst.itc.it Abstract among the users. Last but not least, the considered task requires some attention from the user, which must indeed This work presents a usability evaluation performed dur- understand the original documents and extract the relevant ing the field-test of a speech based data-entry system. The data. The speed of the data-entry process would be relevant application domain is the data-entry of personnel absence only if it could be separated from the time required to inter- records from a huge historical paper archive. The system pret the data, which in fact depends on the single document was tested by 12 employees of the personnel office of a pub- and the user skill. lic administration. The evaluation, based on the well known Finally, it has been shown [4] that a fair comparison be- usability engineering paradigm, analyzed five human fac- tween speech versus keying requires an experimental set-up tors of the user interface: i.e. learnability, memorability, er- that tries to optimize the “transaction cycle” of each input rors, efficiency and satisfaction. Evaluation measures were medium, i.e. the number of user actions necessary to per- taken through a questionnaire and by logging usage of the form a task. By experiments [4] on a command and control system during a period of fi