# Design and Applications of GLANCE: GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience
## 3 Results of the 1 st Macro-Phase: The GLANCE Project
### Third Iteration: Final Release of the Proof-of-Concept and Definition of a General Formal
#### 3.3.3 Evaluation and Learning  
As discussed in Section 3.1.1, the design choices related to transitions in Table 5 are based on already validated literature results. In particular, the five severity levels used in GLANCE (cleared, warning, minor, major, and critical) are mapped onto four notification levels (change-blind, make-aware, interrupt, and demand-action) adopted and validated by PTK, a toolkit providing structured support for managing user attention in the develop  
Figure 9: Handling multiple notifications: (**a**) An example of horizontal scrolling in the case of highway traffic information organized by regions; the currently displayed region is Puglia, with two incoming notifications; (**b**) an example of tabbing in the case of incoming mail; the currently displayed category is “Spam”, with one incoming notification; and (**c**) an example of a two-level structure: The currently displayed category is “News”, with four notifications scattered into a number of subcategories handled by horizontal scrolling; the currently displayed subcategory is “Sport”, with two incoming notifications. ment of peripheral displays [38], and associated to transition types known to be adequate for making displays work in the correct zone of the attention-awareness graph (inattention, divided attention, and focused attention), as surveyed in [38]. In particular, displays working in the inattention zone use very gradual animation, minimizing motion (e.g., [38; 64]), displays working in the divided attention zone employ a number of techniques based on abrupt changes (e.g., [38; 65; 66]), and displays working in the focused attention zone use significant motion/changes in the interface to draw user's attention (e.g., [38; 67]). Having based transitions on such validated results, we expected GLANCE to correctly behave as a change-blind/ambient/alerting display based on notification severity, and for this reason the evaluation at the end of the first two iterations was primarily focused on the GLANCE visual coding technique, which, as already observed, is the leading aspect of the study. At the end of the third iteration, we set up a usability test to evaluate the extended model with scrolling and tabbing mechanisms including also the validation of the mapping in Table 5, i.e., the GLANCE ability to make users \"consume\" notifications in the correct way, with an immediate reaction to severe ones and subliminal long-term comprehension of minor ones. _Experiment design._ The scenario in Figure 9c, which includes both new mechanisms, was evaluated by a laboratory-based controlled observational study grounded on a dual-task test to simulate what happens in a scenario in which notifications arrive while the operator is attending other tasks. The objective of the study was to measure how GLANCE notification effects can influence performances in a dual-task setting, both on the foreground and the background task. The study was designed to have participants performing a primary text-reading task while, at the same time, monitoring notifications delivered by GLANCE. We wanted to measure, on the one hand, how distracting the notifications were on the text-reading performance (by user observation and a post-experiment test) and, on the other hand, how memorable the notifications were (by a post-experiment test). Notifications to be administered to participants were designed to be credible content of a multichannel notifier. In particular, the sample GLANCE display used for the test included four categories (i.e., four tabs) related to _stock market_ (with two subcategories), _incoming email_ (with four subcategories), _news_ (with five subcategories), and _calendar_ (with four subcategories).