Attention and Intention Goals Can Mediate Disruption in Human-Computer Interaction

Multitasking environments cause people to be interrupted constantly, often interfering with their ongoing tasks, activities and goals. This paper focuses on the disruption caused by interruptions and presents a disruption mediating approach for balancing the negative effects of interruptions with respect to the benefits of interruptions relevant to the user goals. Our work shows how Disruption Manager utilizing context and relationships to user goals and tasks can assess when and how to present interruptions in order to reduce their disruptiveness. The Disruption Management Framework was created to take into consideration motivations that influence people's interruption decision process. The framework predicts the effects from interruptions using a three-layer software architecture: a knowledge layer including information about topics related to the ongoing activity, an intermediate layer including summarized information about the user tasks and their stages, and a low level layer including implicit low granularity information, such as mouse movement, context switching and windowing activity to support fail-safe disruption management when no other contextual information is available. The manager supports implicit monitoring of ongoing behaviors and categorizing possible disruptive outcome given the user and system state. The manager monitors actions and uses common sense reasoning in its model to compare communication stream topics with topics files that are active on the desktop. Experiments demonstrate that disruption manager significantly reduces the impact of interruptions and improve people's performance in a multiapplication desktop scenario with email and instant messaging. In a complex order taking activity, disruption manager yielded a 26% performance increase for tasks prioritized as being important and a 32.5% increase for urgent tasks. The evaluation shows that the modulated interruptions did not distract or troubled users. Further, subjects using the Disruption Manager were 5 times more likely to respond effectively to instant messages.

[1]  Kara A. Latorella,et al.  The Scope and Importance of Human Interruption in Human-Computer Interaction Design , 2002, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[2]  佚名.  THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE高效人士的七种习惯 , 2003 .

[3]  Anthony M. Armocida.  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , 1992 .

[4]  Mary Czerwinski,et al.  Instant Messaging: Effects of Relevance and Timing , 2000 .

[5]  D. Scott McCrickard,et al.  Attuning notification design to user goals and attention costs , 2003, Commun. ACM.

[6]  Wayne D. Gray,et al.  Managing Attention by Preparing to Forget , 2000 .

[7]  Erik T. Mueller,et al.  Open Mind Common Sense: Knowledge Acquisition from the General Public , 2002, OTM.

[8]  Stephen M. Hess,et al.  Training to Reduce the Disruptive Effects of Interruptions , 1994 .

[9]  C McFarlaneDaniel,et al.  The scope and importance of human interruption in human-computer interaction design , 2002 .

[10]  Mary Czerwinski,et al.  Instant Messaging and Interruption: Influence of Task Type on Performance , 2000 .

[11]  Ivan Burmistrov,et al.  Do Interrupted Users Work Faster or Slower? The Micro-analysis of Computerized Text Editing Task , 2003 .

[12]  Steven J. Plimpton,et al.  Massively parallel methods for engineering and science problems , 1994, CACM.

[13]  S. Gievska,et al.  Examining the Qualitative Gains of Mediating Human Interruptions during HCI , 2005 .

[14]  Brian P. Bailey,et al.  Understanding and developing models for detecting and differentiating breakpoints during interactive tasks , 2007, CHI.

[15]  Ernesto Arroyo,et al.  Self-adaptive multimodal-interruption interfaces , 2003, IUI '03.

[16]  A Latorella Kara,et al.  Effects of Modality on Interrupted Flight Deck Performance: Implications for Data Link , 1998 .

[17]  Brian P. Bailey,et al.  Measuring the effects of interruptions on task performance in the user interface , 2000, Smc 2000 conference proceedings. 2000 ieee international conference on systems, man and cybernetics. 'cybernetics evolving to systems, humans, organizations, and their complex interactions' (cat. no.0.

[18]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  Disruption and recovery of computing tasks: field study, analysis, and directions , 2007, CHI.

[19]  D. Broadbent,et al.  What makes interruptions disruptive? A study of length, similarity, and complexity , 1989 .

[20]  Brian P. Bailey,et al.  Understanding changes in mental workload during execution of goal-directed tasks and its application for interruption management , 2008, TCHI.

[21]  Mary Czerwinski,et al.  A diary study of task switching and interruptions , 2004, CHI.

[22]  Thomas Goschke,et al.  On the role of imagery in linear syllogistic reasoning , 1988 .

[23]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  Learning and reasoning about interruption , 2003, ICMI '03.

[24]  Henry Lieberman,et al.  Out of context: Computer systems that adapt to, and learn from, context , 2000, IBM Syst. J..

[25]  Mark Claypool,et al.  Implicit interest indicators , 2001, IUI '01.

[26]  Koji Tsukada,et al.  The Multi-Project Support System based on multiplicity of task , 1994, Proceedings Eighteenth Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 94).

[27]  John R. Anderson,et al.  What can a mouse cursor tell us more?: correlation of eye/mouse movements on web browsing , 2001, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[28]  Jens Rasmussen,et al.  Information Processing and Human-Machine Interaction: An Approach to Cognitive Engineering , 1986 .

[29]  Ernesto Arroyo,et al.  Interruptions as multimodal outputs: which are the less disruptive? , 2002, Proceedings. Fourth IEEE International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces.

[30]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Agents that reduce work and information overload , 1994, CACM.

[31]  Eric Horvitz,et al.  Models of attention in computing and communication , 2003, Commun. ACM.

[32]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Predictors of availability in home life context-mediated communication , 2004, CSCW.

[33]  Daniel C. McFarlane,et al.  Coordinating the Interruption of People in Human-Computer Interaction , 1999, INTERACT.

[34]  Mary Czerwinski,et al.  Notification, Disruption, and Memory: Effects of Messaging Interruptions on Memory and Performance , 2001, INTERACT.

[35]  Jens Rasmussen,et al.  Information Processing and Human-Machine Interaction , 1986 .

[36]  E. A. Locke,et al.  Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation. A 35-year odyssey. , 2002, The American psychologist.

[37]  Thomas Jackson,et al.  The cost of email interruption , 2001, Journal of Systems and Information Technology.

[38]  Robert S. Baron,et al.  Distraction, attentional conflict, and drivelike behavior , 1983 .

[39]  Scott P. Robertson,et al.  Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 1991 .