Peripheral Notifications: Effects of Feature Combination and Task Interference
Date
2019-05-28
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
Visual notifications are integral to interactive computing systems. The design of visual notifications
entails two main considerations: first, visual notifications should be noticeable, as they usually
aim to attract a user`s attention to a location away from their main task; second, their noticeability
has to be moderated to prevent user distraction and annoyance. Although notifications have been
around for a long time on standard desktop environments, new computing environments such as
large screens add new factors that have to be taken into account when designing notifications. With
large displays, much of the content is in the user's visual periphery, where human capacity to notice
visual effects is diminished. One design strategy for enhancing noticeability is to combine visual
features, such as motion and colour. Yet little is known about how feature combinations affect
noticeability across the visual field, or about how peripheral noticeability changes when a user is
working on an attention-demanding task. We addressed these questions by conducting two studies.
We conducted a laboratory study that tested people's ability to detect popout targets that used
combinations of three visual variables. After determining that the noticeability of feature combinations
were approximately equal to the better of the individual features, we designed an experiment
to investigate peripheral noticeability and distraction when a user is focusing on a primary task.
Our results suggest that there can be interference between the demands of primary tasks and the
visual features in the notifications. Furthermore, primary task performance is adversely affected by
motion effects in the peripheral notifications. Our studies contribute to a better understanding of
how visual features operate when used as peripheral notifications. We provide new insights, both
in terms of combining features, and interactions with primary tasks.
Description
Keywords
visualization, HCI, notifications
Citation
Degree
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Department
Computer Science
Program
Computer Science