Tara Matthews

A toolkit for managing user attention in peripheral displays

Traditionally, computer interfaces have been confined to conventional displays and focused activities. However, as displays become embedded throughout our environment and daily lives, increasing numbers of them must operate on the periphery of our attention. <i>Peripheral displays</i> can allow a person to be aware of information while she is attending to some other primary task or activity. We present the Peripheral Displays Toolkit (PTK), a toolkit that provides structured support for managing user attention in the development of peripheral displays. Our goal is to enable designers to explore different approaches to managing user attention. The PTK supports three issues specific to conveying information on the periphery of human attention. These issues are <i>abstraction</i> of raw input, rules for assigning <i>notification levels</i> to input, and <i>transitions</i> for updating a display when input arrives. Our contribution is the investigation of issues specific to attention in peripheral display design and a toolkit that encapsulates support for these issues. We describe our toolkit architecture and present five sample peripheral displays demonstrating our toolkits capabilities.

Defining, designing, and evaluating peripheral displays: an analysis using activity theory

ABSTRACT Peripheral displays are an important class of applications that improve our ability to balance multiple activities. However, peripheral display innovation and development has suffered because much of the past work has been technology driven: There exists little theoretical understanding of how they operate in relation to peoples everyday lives. In response to this, we present a framework for understanding, designing, and evaluating peripheral displays based on Activity Theory. We argue that peripheral displays are information displays that become unobtrusive to users. As this quality depends on the context of use, we present a framework for describing peripheral displays based on the number and types of activities they support. Furthermore, we argue that different types of displays require different approaches to evaluation. From our own work and a review of related literature we derive a set of general evaluation criteria for peripheral displays (appeal, learnability, awareness, effects of breakdowns, and distraction). We then describe approaches for evaluating these criteria for different types of peripheral displays and present a case study to illustrate the value of our Activity Theory evaluation framework in practice.

Scribe4Me: evaluating a mobile sound transcription tool for the deaf

People who are deaf or hard-of-hearing may have challenges communicating with others via spoken words and may have challenges being aware of audio events in their environments. This is especially true in public places, which may not have accessible ways of communicating announcements and other audio events. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a mobile sound transcription tool for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Our tool, Scribe4Me, is designed to improve awareness of sound-based information in any location. When a button is pushed on the tool, a transcription of the last 30 seconds of sound is given to the user in a text message. Transcriptions include dialog and descriptions of environmental sounds. We describe a 2-week field study of an exploratory prototype, which shows that our approach is feasible, highlights particular contexts in which it is useful, and provides information about what should be contained in transcriptions.

Clipping lists and change borders: improving multitasking efficiency with peripheral information design

Information workers often have to balance many tasks and interruptions. In this work, we explore peripheral display techniques that improve multitasking efficiency by helping users maintain task flow, know when to resume tasks, and more easily reacquire tasks. Specifically, we compare two types of abstraction that provide different task information: semantic content extraction, which displays only the most relevant content in a window, and change detection, which signals when a change has occurred in a window (all de-signed as modifications to Scalable Fabric [17]). Results from our user study suggest that semantic content extraction improves multitasking performance more so than either change detection or our base case of scaling. Results also show that semantic content extraction provides significant benefits to task flow, resumption timing, and reacquisition. We discuss the implication of these findings on the design of peripheral interfaces that support multitasking.

Visualizing non-speech sounds for the deaf

Sounds constantly occur around us, keeping us aware of our surroundings. People who are deaf have difficulty maintaining an awareness of these ambient sounds. We present an investigation of peripheral, visual displays to help people who are deaf maintain an awareness of sounds in the environment. Our contribution is twofold. First, we present a set of visual design preferences and functional requirements for peripheral visualizations of non-speech audio that will help improve future applications. Visual design preferences include ease of interpretation, glance-ability, and appropriate distractions. Functional requirements include the ability to identify what sound occurred, view a history of displayed sounds, customize the information that is shown, and determine the accuracy of displayed information. Second, we designed, implemented, and evaluated two fully functioning prototypes that embody these preferences and requirements, serving as examples for future designers and furthering progress toward understanding how to best provide peripheral audio awareness for the deaf.

Designing and evaluating glanceable peripheral displays

Peripheral displays are an important class of applications that improve our ability to multitask. Increased knowledge on how to design and evaluate glanceable peripheral displays can lead to better support for multitasking. We will contribute a set of guidelines for designing glanceable peripheral displays, using the wealth of abstraction techniques (e.g., change detection, feature extraction), design variables (e.g., color, shape), and design characteristics (e.g., dimensionality, symbolism) available. We will contribute an evaluation framework that clearly defines peripheral displays, metrics for evaluating their success, and guidelines for selecting evaluation methods. These contributions will improve peripheral displays that enable users to manage multiple tasks through low-effort monitoring.

Evaluating Non-Speech Sound Visualizations for the Deaf

Sounds such as co-workers chatting nearby or a dripping faucet help us maintain awareness of and respond to our surroundings. Without a tool that communicates ambient sounds in a non-auditory manner, maintaining this awareness is difficult for people who are deaf. We present an iterative investigation of peripheral, visual displays of ambient sounds. Our major contributions are: (1) a rich understanding of what ambient sounds are useful to people who are deaf, (2) a set of visual and functional requirements for a peripheral sound display, based on feedback from people who are deaf, (3) lab-based evaluations investigating the characteristics of four prototypes, and (4) a set of design guidelines for successful ambient audio displays, based on a comparison of four implemented prototypes and user feedback. Our work provides valuable information about the sound awareness needs of the deaf and can help to inform further design of such applications.

Augmenting Collections of Everyday Objects: A Case Study of Clothes Hangers As an Information Display

Though the common conception of human-computer interfaces is one of screens and keyboards, the emergence of ubiquitous computing envisions interfaces that will spread from the desktop into our environments. This gives rise to the development of novel interaction devices and the augmentation of common everyday objects to serve as interfaces between the physical and the virtual. Previous work has provided exemplars of such everyday objects augmented with interactive behaviour. We propose that richer opportunities arise when collections of everyday objects are considered as substrate for interfaces. In an initial case study we have taken clothes hangers as an example and augmented them to collectively function as an information display.

Evaluating Peripheral Displays

Although peripheral displays have been a domain of inquiry for over a decade now, evaluation criteria and techniques for this area are still being created. Peripheral display evaluation is an acknowledged challenge in a field setting. This chapter first describes models and methods that have been tailored specifically to evaluating peripheral displays (measuring how well they achieve their goals). Then, we present evaluation criteria used in past evaluations of peripheral displays, ranging from issues such as learnability to distraction. After explaining how these criteria have been assessed in the past, we present a case study evaluation of two e-mail peripheral displays that demonstrates the pros and cons of various evaluation techniques.