Balancing Awareness and Interruption: Investigation of Notification Deferral Policies

We present a novel system for notification management and report results from two studies testing its performance and impact. The system uses statistical models to realize defer-to-breakpoint policies for managing notifications. The first study tested how well the models detect three types of breakpoints within novel task sequences. Results show that the models detect breakpoints reasonably well, but struggle to differentiate their type. Our second study explored effects of managing notifications with our system on users and their tasks. Results showed that scheduling notifications at breakpoints reduces frustration and reaction time relative to delivering them immediately. We also found that the relevance of notification content determines the type of breakpoint at which it should be delivered. The core concept of scheduling notifications at breakpoints fits well with how users prefer notifications to be managed. This indicates that users would likely adopt the use of notification management systems in practice.

show abstract

“…139.3s). These times are consistent with breakpoint distances reported in [22], and with transition times to non-busy states in [14].…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 89%

“…These would be the moments when delivering such notifications would be least disruptive. Urgency of notification content should also be considered when selecting an appropriate policy and timeframe [14].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of intelligent notification management on users and their tasks

Iqbal

Bailey

2008

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

149

100

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This highlights the importance of a good notification scheduler, able to manage and control notifications of all modalities so that low-priority notifications are not delivered disruptively and that important notifications are delivered in a timely manner in an appropriate modality. This is an active area of research which has already shown how effective a welldesigned notification scheduler can be [3,12,28]. However, more research is needed to guide the design of multimodal notification systems for the home.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of unwanted multimodal notifications

Warnock

McGee‐Lennon

Brewster

2011

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Multimodal interaction can be used to make home care technology more effective and appropriate, particularly for people with sensory impairments. Previous work has revealed how disruptive notifications in different modalities are to a home-based task, but has not investigated how disruptive unwanted notifications might be. An experiment was conducted which evaluated the disruptive effects of unwanted notifications when delivered in textual, pictographic, abstract visual, speech, earcon, auditory icon, tactile and olfactory modalities. It was found that for all the modalities tested, both wanted and unwanted notifications produced similar reductions in error rate and task success, independent of modality. The results demonstrate the need to control and limit the number of unwanted notifications delivered in the home and contribute to a large body of work advocating the inclusion of multiple interaction modalities.

show abstract

“…For example, Horvitz et al [4] found that decreased performance resulted from inappropriate interruptions to complex tasks due to higher demands on cognitive capacity. Chapanis and Overbey [2] found that while interruptions changed the way that participants chose to accomplish a task, the actual performance time generally was not affected.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring minimal nonverbal interruption in HRI

2011

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-Designing robotic behaviours capable of initiating an interruption will be extremely important as robots increasingly interact with people. Consequently, we explore the social impact of a minimal set of physical nonverbal cues that can be exhibited by a robot to initiate robot-human interruption: (a) speed of motion, (b) gaze, (c) head movement, d) rotation and (e) proximity to the person. We present two related studies evaluating this set. First, for requirements gathering, we observed the behaviour of interruption between humans, with a human actor attempting to interrupt other humans while being constrained to use only a set of behavioural cues that could be mimicked by a simple nonverbal robot. Next, we programmed a robot to exhibit similar social physical nonverbal cues, and tested their feasibility in a user study of robotic nonverbal interruption across interruption scenarios. Our results show that people were able to interpret interruption urgency from robot behaviour using only minimal nonverbal behavioural cues. These findings contribute to informing future designs of social human-robot interfaces.

show abstract

Balancing Awareness and Interruption: Investigation of Notification Deferral Policies

Cited by 47 publications

References 3 publications

Effects of intelligent notification management on users and their tasks

Effects of intelligent notification management on users and their tasks

The impact of unwanted multimodal notifications

Exploring minimal nonverbal interruption in HRI

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About