Coordinating the Interruption of People in Human-Computer Interaction.

TLDR

People’s cognitive limitations make them vulnerable to interruption, which can lead to serious errors, and such interruptions are a common side effect of systems that delegate tasks to background processes. The study aims to design user interfaces that accommodate these limitations when interrupting users. Using a theory‑based taxonomy, the authors identified four interruption‑decision methods and compared them in an experiment with 36 participants. The experiment revealed significant differences among the four interface designs in how they handle interruptions.

Abstract

People have cognitive limitations that make them sensitive to interruption. These limitations can cause people to make serious mistakes when they are interrupted. Unfortunately, interruption of people is a side effect of systems that allow users to delegate tasks to active background processes, like intelligent software agents. Delegation carries the costs of supervision, and that often includes being interrupted by subordinates. User interfaces for these kinds of computer systems must be designed to accommodate people’s limitations relative to being interrupted. A theory-based taxonomy of human interruption was used to identify the four known methods for deciding when to interrupt people. An experiment was conducted with 36 subjects to compare these four different design approaches within a common context. The results show important differences between the four user interface design solutions to the problem of interrupting people in human-computer interaction (HCI).