Deriving Personas Based on Attitudes to Interruption and Information Overload

Ubiquitous devices provide users with notifications that continue to blur the distinction between work and personal activities. This research aims to understand how users manage and would like to manage such notifications in order to design better support. A methodology was developed to create design scenarios from a survey of people’s attitudes and perceptions. The survey asked participants how they interact with various collaborative, social and communication services, and about their views regarding trust in those services, privacy and how they have experienced information overload. A two-step clustering technique was then used to identify distinct archetypes within the respondents resulting in 5 personas. A technique uniting personas and empathy map has been applied to model typical behaviours, goals and pain points, which will inform the design of a solution to manage interruptions and information overload.