Paying Attention to Interruption: A Human-Centered Approach to Intelligent Interruption Management

Опубликовано 7 сентября 2016, 16:43

Proactive computing offers many desired benefits to users, such as enabling a high degree of awareness of peripheral information. However, notifications from proactive systems run the serious risk of interrupting users' tasks at inopportune moments, decreasing performance and increasing frustration. In this talk, I will discuss our ongoing empirical and systems development work aimed at maintaining timely delivery of notifications while reducing costs of interruption. Grounded in cognitive theories of attention, a central theme of our work has been to leverage deeper understanding of the structure of user tasks in order to pinpoint lower cost moments for interruption. Our empirical work has shown favorable results for deferring notifications until meaningful breakpoints in a task, while our systems development work has begun to understand how to efficiently automate this process in practice. The work discussed should be applicable in most situations in which users perform goal-directed tasks in the midst of periodic interruption.