| Interruptive notifications in a desktop environment are an important service that knowledge workers rely on for maintaining awareness of information and services outside their current focus. Research to date has focused primarily on empirical laboratory-based testing, which is very specific and out of context of a realistic user environment, and broad ethnographic research, which is not specific enough for meaningful notification system design guidelines. This dissertation aims to address the gap between existing laboratory-based and ethnographic research by conducting a series of studies that explored the notification user experience in a both broad and deep way. The results of this research contribute the following: A catalog of significant contextual factors that affect the notification user experience; a series of models that describe how factors in the notification system context influence the overall user experience; a set of design guidelines, derived from this research but generalized to be applicable to any interruptive notification system. |
