Tradeoffs in displaying peripheral information

Peripheral information is information that is not central to a person's current task, but provides the person the opportunity to learn more, to do a better job, or to keep track of less important tasks. Though peripheral information displays are ubiquitous, they have been rarely studied. For computer users, a common peripheral display is a scrolling text display that provides announcements, sports scores, stock prices, or other news. In this paper, we investigate how to design peripheral displays so that they provide the most information while having the least impact on the user's performance on the main task. We report a series of experiments on scrolling displays aimed at examining tradeoffs between distraction of scrolling motion and memorability of information displayed. Overall, we found that continuously scrolling displays are more distracting than displays that start and stop, but information in both is remembered equally well. These results are summarized in a set of design recommendations.

[1]  Henry Lieberman,et al.  Autonomous interface agents , 1997, CHI.

[2]  Paul P. Maglio,et al.  Facilitating navigation in information spaces: Road-signs on the World Wide Web , 1999, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[3]  Paul P. Maglio,et al.  The computational basis of interactive skill , 1996 .

[4]  Eun-Seok Lee,et al.  Agent-Based Support for Personalized Information with Web Search Engines , 1997, HCI.

[5]  Allen Cypher,et al.  The Structure of Users’ Activities , 1986 .

[6]  J. G. Hollands,et al.  Engineering Psychology and Human Performance , 1984 .

[7]  Paul P. Maglio,et al.  How to Build Modeling Agents to Support Web Searchers , 1997 .

[8]  Thomas B. Sheridan,et al.  Monitoring Behavior and Supervisory Control , 1976 .

[9]  John F. Larish,et al.  Training for attentional control in dual task settings: A comparison of young and old adults , 1995 .

[10]  Neville Moray,et al.  Monitoring behavior and supervisory control , 1986 .

[11]  Christopher D. Wickens,et al.  The identification and transfer of timesharing skills , 1980 .

[12]  David Owen Answers First, Then Questions , 1986 .

[13]  C. Wickens Engineering psychology and human performance, 2nd ed. , 1992 .

[14]  Keith Duncan,et al.  Cognitive Engineering , 2017, Encyclopedia of GIS.

[15]  Andrew Rutherford Handbook of perception and human performance. Vol 1: Sensory processes and perception. Vol 2: Cognitive processes and performance. , 1987 .

[16]  J F Juola,et al.  Reading Moving Text on a CRT Screen , 1984, Human factors.

[17]  Daniel Gopher,et al.  Manipulating the Conditions of Training in Time-Sharing Performance , 1977 .

[18]  K S Seidler,et al.  Information access in a dual-task context: testing a model of optimal strategy selection. , 1997, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied.

[19]  P A Kolers,et al.  Readability of Text Scrolled on Visual Display Terminals as a Function of Window Size , 1983, Human factors.

[20]  Hiroshi Ishii,et al.  Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms , 1997, CHI.

[21]  Giovanni Adorni,et al.  Route Guidance as a Just-In-Time Multiagent Task , 1996, Appl. Artif. Intell..

[22]  Paul Muter,et al.  Reading dynamically displayed text , 1989 .

[23]  R. Flesch A new readability yardstick. , 1948, The Journal of applied psychology.

[24]  J. Juola,et al.  Visual search and reading of rapid serial presentations of letter strings, words, and text. , 1982 .

[25]  Arnold F. Kanarick,et al.  Effects of Value on the Monitoring of Multi-Channel Displays , 1969 .