Last spring, Brian Bailey made the trip from Illinois to talk to our IU School of Informatics HCI group about his research on alerts. Bailey and fellow researchers—like doctoral student Shamsi Iqbal—have painstakingly explored the nature of task interruptions in trying to identify the best times to alert users to new information. From the Illinois Computer Science website:
The purpose of the Attention Manager (AM) is to schedule notifications to be delivered at moments during task execution when the expected cost of interruption is low. Iqbal envisions a system in which an application wishing to gain user attention will send a request to the AM along with a maximum time it is willing to wait. The AM would monitor the user’s tasks and use predefined statistical models of user activities to predict the lowest cost moment for granting the request within the given time frame.
“Shamsi’s research has produced compelling evidence that deferring notifications until ‘breakpoints’ are reached during a task can result in meaningful reductions in disruption, and that these points occur often enough that the timeliness of notifications is not sacrificed,” says CS Professor Brian Bailey.
This work turned out to be very influential in the way I think about designing technology interventions, and it is what I think about whenever Twitterrific shows me a new tweet from my personal information stream.
Usability experts have thought about the value of interruptions in lab testing. The argument being, if usability tests are conducted in settings where phones aren’t ringing, impromptu discussions are avoided, and email is not a distraction, the results of the experiment aren’t likely to reflect real-world context. The interruptions should be part of the system design, and thus need to also be part of the research about a system’s effectiveness.
Interruptions are not always in the form of little alert boxes. Our own Will Ryan has spent the past two years thinking about a related concept of breakdown—a disconnection from the sense of being-in-the-world, or flow. When you are playing a game and fully immersed in the story action, the last thing you want is to be conscious of how you move a mouse or manipulate the in-world navigation. When there is a technical hiccup or human error that causes that continuity to be disrupted, the brain shifts to being cognizant of the problem and thus not as involved in the world of the game narrative.
Will is attempting to create a framework for heuristic analysis of areas where breakdown occurs. This includes:
- Instruction—The order and method of delivery can take a person out of a learning moment, as can the level of cognitive load needed to process the lesson.
- Player Action—Simple mechanics of coordinating computer devices with in-world navigation is ripe with breakdown opportunities, as is the translation from 3D reality to a 2D monitor.
- Meaning Development—Various representations of maps, avatars and other in-game objects can created a dissonance with the user.
- Cues & Hints—The cursor and objects offer affordances to their use, but sometimes that is misinterpreted for other actions. There is also a moment of breakdown when the user has to switch from a passive presentation into active game play.
- Player Algorithm—Involves concepts like distinguishing importance, causal association and event triggering.
Although some of this terminology and framing is biased toward video games, the concept behind coding breakdowns in this way has applications to community building practices and user interface design in general.
I am struck by how compatible Will’s understanding of breakdown is with Relational Cultural Theory and the idea of people moving in and out of connection with others. A relationship is not a static entity that is either on or off, strong or weak. It is a process of relating to someone else in a way that accepts a value of disconnection as the facilitator for reconnection. Bad relationships are not ones that experience disconnection. Rather, they are characterized by an inability to quickly and authentically return to a state of connection with the other person. Likewise, breakdown and flow (or, “breakthrough” as Marty Siegel wanted to call it) are symbiotic, needing each other for a health user experience.
Interruptions therefore can serve an important purpose. Whether intentional or organic, a scheme for well-designed interruptions can improve the perceived quality of the experience.
