# Design and Applications of GLANCE: GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience
## 4 Results of the 2 nd Macro-Phase: Application and Refinement of GLANCE
### Application to a Personal Customizable Notifier  
As observed in Section 3.2.2, the GLANCE monitoring/overviewing capability, extended by the introduction of scrolling and tabbing mechanisms, allows one to view the features of GLANCE as the basis for customizable multichannel notifiers. We hence investigated the exploitation of achieved results for designing a personalizable multichannel notification display. In particular, we considered a notification space composed of a number of distinct categories (e.g., news, email, weather, etc.) as in the scenario depicted in Figure 9(c) (categories are associated to tabs and further structured into subcategories handled by scrolling). An additional analysis led to a revision of some aspects of the category management, aimed at overcoming two different efficacy problems. The first one is related to the abstractness of the display with respect to category management, which, though formally correct, may cause \"similarity interference\" (a problem discussed also in [69]): When formatting visual displays for dynamically updating environments, the design has to make information highly distinctive across the displayed items. In our case, while the currently visualized category is easily recognizable, no information other than number and severity of incoming notifications is graspable at a glance for the other categories. The second problem is related to the upper bound on the number of manageable tabs, which translates into an upper bound on the number of categories that users may decide to monitor, hence becoming a sever limitation to the broader applicability of the notifier. A unified solution for the two problems was found by rethinking the category area according to the basic ideas in Figure 10: A _category bar_ behaves as a scrollable list of categories visually represented by icons (Figure 10a), with the multifold effect of removing \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**GLANCE Property** & **AVG of Students** & **AVG of Personnel** & **Overall AVG** \\ \hline Intuitiveness & 4.29 & 4 & 4.13 \\ Glanceability & 4.29 & 4 & 4.13 \\ Lack of intrusiveness & 3.86 & 4.12 & 4 \\ Perceived usefulness & 3.57 & 4.37 & 4 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 9: Subjective GLANCE evaluation. the upper bound on the number of categories, solving the similarity interference problem, and exploiting perceptual sensory immediacy. Furthermore, as illustrated in Figure 10b, a category is associated to a _status sensitive icon_, i.e., to a family of icons getting visually richer as the number of simultaneous alarms increases, thus providing a rough indication of the number N of simultaneous incoming notifications within a category (the exact indication of N is provided by tagging the icon with N). In other words, we now combine in the _category bar_ most of the information previously split in the tabs and in the synthetic components. Clearly, the icon style is just a matter of aesthetic and the one in Figure 10 is to be viewed just as an example of the new approach based on status sensitive icons (actual tools based on this model might also offer a choice of multiple themes). Notice also that status sensitive icons allow now a first LOD exclusively based on the category bar showing a glanceable overview on the number of incoming notifications (simple additional visual hints might also indicate which categories include critical notifications, if any) and the small arrow below the icons allows one to access a second LOD including the notification details as in the previous version of GLANCE. Now, since in an application like this it is reasonable to offer both a user-initiated and a system-initiated interaction, we need a mechanism to automatically cycle over categories with incoming notifications.