When to Interrupt: A Comparative Analysis of Interruption Timings Within Collaborative Communication Tasks (original) (raw)
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Coordinating the Interruption of People in Human-Computer Interaction
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).
Behaviours and preferences when coordinating mediated interruptions: Social and system influence
ECSCW 2007, 2007
There is a growing interest in technologies for supporting individuals to manage their accessibility for interruptions. The applicability of these technologies is likely to be influenced by social relationships between people. This paper describes an experiment that examines interplay between the collaborative relationship of an interruptor and an interruptee and two different system approaches to handle interruptions. We tested how the system behaviour and the working relationship between the actors influence their interruption behaviours. The results of this experiment regarding the influence of social relation confirm the findings of prior works saying that interruptors show more consideration when initiating interruptions if they share a common goal with interruptees comparing to the situation when they do not. We have extended those findings by showing that interruptees display similar interruption behaviours to those presented by interruptors. The results regarding the system influence show a clear trend towards the positive effect of the Automatic system on peoples' interruption behaviours which is based on: (i) the visible interruption costs, (ii) social tension and (iii) system preference. We think that the results of this experiment translated into the design implications can prove helpful in informing the design of computer-mediated solutions supporting interruption handling.
The scope and importance of human interruption in human-computer interaction …
Human-Computer Interaction, 2002
At first glance it seems absurd that busy people doing important jobs should want their computers to interrupt them. Interruptions are disruptive and people need to concentrate to make good decisions. However, successful job perfor- mance also frequently depends on people's ...
Designing the Impression of Social Agents' Real-time Interruption Handling
2019
Human interaction partners can deal with interruptions and then resume the interaction. This ability should be emulated by social agents. How fast interruptions are handled might influence the overall impression of an agent. In this paper, we present the results of a user study on how a human dialog partner perceives the behavior of a virtual agent handling verbal user interruptions with different reaction times. The study goes beyond typical perception experiments by preserving the real-time interaction experience. For the evaluation, we rely on a parametrizable parallelized computational model that represents dialog flow, overlap detection, conflict recognition, and conflict handling in real-time. The evaluation results show that the timing of the agent's interruption handling in interactive human-agent dialogues is related to different interpersonal attitudes.
The scope and importance of human interruption in human-computer interaction design
Human-Computer Interaction, 2002
At first glance it seems absurd that busy people doing important jobs should want their computers to interrupt them. Interruptions are disruptive and people need to concentrate to make good decisions. However, successful job performance also frequently depends on people's abilities to (a) constantly monitor their dynamically changing information environments, (b) collaborate and communicate with other people in the system, and (c) supervise background autonomous services. These critical abilities can require people to simultaneously query a large set of information sources, continuously monitor for important events, and respond to and communicate with other human operators.
Examining the qualitative gains of mediating human interruptions during hci
2005
Recent trends in software development directed toward intelligence, distribution, and mobility have brought sophisticated software artifacts that often come with some unwanted side effects; frequent interruptions, for instance. In general, people are less effective when exposed to interruptions. We have created a framework that helps in selecting the most appropriate timing for interruption as a way to mediate human interruptions by the computer. The proposed framework is based on a new Interruption Taxonomy and uses Bayesian Belief Networks for selecting the best timing when mediating interruptions. An empirical study was conducted to empirically measure the qualitative gains of mediating interruptions compared to condition with no interruption control i.e., interruptions were presented immediately at random-generated points. The experimental results suggest that mediated coordination of interruption was effective in decreasing some disruptive effects of interruptions on a socioemotional level, such as: the feelings of frustration, distraction, annoyance and workload. 2 Interruption Taxonomy The motivation behind this work is the belief that effective coordination of interruptions during human-computer interaction cannot be accomplished without an appropriate interruption model. As a basis for the model a new
Awareness Displays and Interruptions in Teams
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Work life is filled with interruptions, most of which benefit the interrupter at the expense of the one being interrupted. We conducted an experiment to determine whether peripheral awareness information about a remote collaborator's workload aids in timing interruptive communication. Results indicate motivation to use the display exists, irrespective of whether both parties are rewarded as part of a team or not. When an informational display was present, a majority of participants used it to time their communication sensitively. We found that a display with an abstract representation of a collaborator's workload is best; it leads to better timing of interruptions without overwhelming the interrupter.
Managing Third-Party Interruptions in Conversations: Effects of Duration and Conversational Role
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2010
Dealing with interruptions in collaborative tasks involves two important processes: managing the face of one's partners and collaboratively reconstructing the topic. In an experiment, pairs were interrupted while narrating personal stories. The duration of the interruption and the conversational role of the target were manipulated. Listeners were more polite than narrators, and longer suspensions caused more effort in reinstatement than short suspensions, but participants were not more polite when suspensions were long.
Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & service Industries, 2015
Interruptions are prevalent phenomena in modern working environments; yet, few interruption studies have been conducted on different types of human tasks. A study using computer-based human behavior tasks was carried out to investigate the effects of interruptions with four different primary-interrupting task sets. The tasks used in this study were determined by cognitive and motor skill processes based on human behavior classification theory. The results showed that interruption effects were most negative in Cognitive/Cognitive task sets, and Skill/Cognitive task sets showed the least amount of effects in task completion time (F[3, 332] = 77.88, p < 0.001). In error rate performance, Skill/Skill task sets showed the highest rate, and error rates for cognitive primary task sets (Cognitive/Cognitive and Cognitive /Skill task sets) were not significantly different (F[1,42] = 41.18, p < 0.001; F[1, 42] = 3.56, p = 0.0661). Interruption frequency also negatively affected task performance (F[1, 412] = 89.88, p < 0.001), but skill tasks’ quantitative performance did not show significant effects at different interruption frequencies (F[1,187] = 3.78, p = 0.0534). The results showed that interruptions increase more time to complete in cognitive tasks and produce more errors in skill tasks. Also, similar types of primary-interrupting tasks were more susceptible from interruptions. Thus, based on task composition of work process, we can estimate different effects from the interruptions and memory load and task similarity in primary-interrupting task relationship were considered main factors.
Interruption Management in Human Multitasking Environments
IFAC-PapersOnLine, 2015
In human multitasking environments, task switching refers to moving from one task to another in a planned manner within an assigned period, whereas task interruption refers to moving from one task to another in an unplanned, usually forced manner. Well-organized task switching and interruption management allow increasing productivity and decreasing error and accident rates, thus contributing to more effective and efficient use of available but limited resources. Although managing task switching and interruptions in human multitasking environments is an important issue, no recent surveys are available to review works and research topics in this area. In this paper, we review how researchers attempt to manage task switching and interruptions in different human multitasking environments and we highlight challenging research directions.