Gradual awareness notification for the desktop environment

Abstract

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.