A usability study of multimodal interfaces for the presentation of internet search results

This article describes a usability evaluation of three interfaces that presented results from queries through internet search engines. One interface used purely text in order to communicate attributes of retrieved results; the remaining two interfaces made use of different combinations of text and metaphors of visual and aural nature. This usability study was based on executions of Internet search activities with specific sets of keywords and on users’ views. Five criteria were considered for measuring the degree of usability of the three interfaces. The results obtained from this investigation have shown that a combination of text, graphical objects and short speech messages increased the level of usability in interfaces of this class.