Multi-Modal Web-Browsing - An Empirical Approach to Improve the Browsing Process of Internet Retrieved Results

This paper describes a survey and an experiment which were carried out to measure some usability aspects of a multi-modal interface to browse documents retrieved from the Internet. An experimental platform, called AVBRO, was developed in order to be used as basis for the experiments. This study investigates the use of audio-visual stimuli as part of a multi-modal interface to communicate the results retrieved from Internet. The experiments were based on a set of Internet queries performed by an experimental and a control group of users. The experimental group of users performed Internet-based search operations using the AVBRO platform, and the control group using the Google search engine. On overall the users in the experimental group performed better than the ones in the control group. This was particular evident when users had to perform complex search queries with a large number of keywords (e.g. 4 to 5). The results of the experiments demonstrated that the experimental group, aided by the AVBRO platform, provided additional feedback about documents retrieved and helped users to access the desired information by visiting fewer web pages and in effect improved usability of browsing documents. A number of conclusions regarding issues of presentation and combination of different modalities were identified.