Matching attentional draw with utility in interruption

Abstract

This research examines a design guideline that aims to increase the positive perception of interruptions. The guideline advocates matching the amount of attention attracted by an interruption's notification method (attentional draw) to the utility of the interruption content. Our first experiment examined a set of 10 visual notification signals in terms of their detection times and established a set of three significantly different signals along the spectrum of attentional draw. Our second experiment investigated matching these different signals to interruption content with different levels of utility. Results indicate that the matching strategy decreases annoyance and increases perception of benefit compared to a strategy that uses the same signal regardless of interruption utility, with no significant impact on workload or performance. Design implications arising from the second experiment as well as recommendations for future work are discussed.

Multi-format Notifications for Multi-tasking

“…Using only the contextual task and notification information selected for consideration in this study, our experiments with a non-adaptive, non-personalized system led to the satisfaction of between half and three-quarters of users, by way of issuing notifications in an intrusive manner across all contextual settings. User satisfaction levels can likely be improved, supporting the need for user modelling and/or machine learning tools, e.g., similar to those used in [6,7] that have the ability to learn desirability of notification formats directly from user response and feedback.…”

“…Gluck, et al [7] studied the effects of correlating the utility of a notification with its relative level of attentional draw. While they also considered multi-format notifications, their study involved one single task per session: not a multi-task setting as investigated in our study.…”

“…The study involved two computer games. One game, which was always available to the user to play, was the Memory game adapted from Gluck, et al [7]; the other was called the "Alien" game and was an adaptation of the popular arcade game "Space Invaders" [13]. 1 For ease of exposition, we adopt the terminology of Trafton, et al [14] and refer to the Memory game as the "primary task" and the Alien game as "secondary.…”

“…To evaluate the relative task load requirements of the different boards, NASA Task Load Index (TLX) [8] ratings, also used in [1,7,11] among others, were analyzed between each pair of boards using a paired t-test with an alpha-adjustment to account for multiple evaluations per board. We found no recognizable difference, statistically, between the two smaller boards on mental demand, effort or frustration (with all p>0.4).…”

“…Much research has addressed both the timing and format of notifications as a potential fix to these negative effects of computerized notifications, especially those that interrupt an ongoing task (e.g., [1,2,7]). Such research has focused primarily on the effects of notifications on user performance and only occasionally considers user preferences for notifications.…”