Tradeoffs in displaying peripheral information

Abstract

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.