Subjective Workload Assessment for On-Hold Telephone Stimuli

The goal of this study was to begin to understand the subjective workload reported by users who are placed on telephone hold while listening to a number of different stimuli. Two separate studies were conducted. In the first study, participants were placed on hold while listening to a series of on hold stimuli. On-hold stimuli comprised of silence, natural voices and tones were used. While on hold, they performed a secondary task. In the second study, participants were not placed on hold, but simply performed each of the tasks. The NASA-TLX was used to measure workload in each of the conditions. Results show that there is a significant difference between subjective workload for the different on-hold stimuli, but that the contributions of the secondary tasks were not clear.