Empirical Validation of a Computer-Mediated Coordination of Interruption

User’s cognitive state is extremely fragile and sensitive to external interruption, especially when a user is performing a cognitively-taxing task. Given that interruptions frequently occur during human-computer interaction, and given the relative scarcity of human attention and their vulnerability to interruptions, interruption-resistance is needed to be considered when designing user interfaces. The main objective of this research has been to explore the possibility of facilitating user’s performance in a context of interruption, by employing a context-sensitive computer-mediated coordination of interruption. A novel Interruption Taxonomy, which synthesizes various kinds of interruption-related context information, served as a basis for implementing graceful coordination of interruption. An exploratory user study was conducted to experimentally evaluate the adequacy of the proposed approach for mediating interruptions and the utility of the Interruption Taxonomy.