Gradual awareness notification for the desktop environment

This thesis develops and puts forth the principles of gradual awareness notification. It distinguishes the concepts of hard and soft notification, and defines situations where gradual awareness techniques can be of the most benefit. Furthermore, it applies gradual awareness principles to the desktop environment to produce slow-growth notification, a visual notification system relying on slowly growing windows. It describes the design principles behind gradual awareness notification, and presents a prototype implementation of slow-growth notification called the Slow-Growth Library, or SGL. Finally, it presents user study results which indicate that slow-growth notification can achieve significant benefits over traditional popup notification systems without needing to be informed of the user's current task. The study demonstrates that slowgrowth notifications were up to 39% less disruptive than popups, and up to 33% subjectively less annoying.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Wilson, Thomas Blake

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robert C. Miller.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36905

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36905