Interruptive notifications in support of task management

Abstract

Our research explores how interruptive notifications support task management in a desktop environment. We conducted two user studies with a community of open source software users and developers to explore their experience with interruptive notifications. We found that certain kinds of notifications support multitasking, task prioritization, task management, as well as influence task disruption management. We discuss how these behaviors affect the notification-task management user experience and offer design guidelines derived from these results to inform better design of systems that interrupt through notification.