Abstract:

Distracted driving is a significant issue for our society today, and yet information technologies, including growing digital music collections, continue to be introduced into the automobile. This paper describes work concerning methods designed to lessen cognitive load and distracting visual demands on drivers as they go about the task of searching for and listening to digital music. The existing commerical paradigms for retrieval - graphical or spoken menu traversal, and text-based search - are unsatisfactory when cognitive resources are limited and keyboards are unavailable. We have previously proposed to use error-tolerant spoken queries [26] combined with direct modalities such as buttons mounted on the steering where [7]. In this paper, we present in detail the results of an experiment designed to compare the industry standard approach of hierarchical graphical menus to our approach. We found our proposed interface to be more efficient and less distracting in a simulated driving task.