# 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
#### 3.3.2 GLANCE Generalization  
At this stage of the design, the general GLANCE model can be described by results summarized in Figure 3 (_single alarm visual coding technique_), Table 5 (_transition strategy_), Section 3.2.1 (_multiple alarms overview technique_), and Table 6 (_simultaneity threshold_). Though the initial goal was domain specific, the achieved design exhibits a level of abstraction that stimulated to investigate not only improvements aimed at overcoming the limits singled  
Figure 8: Redefinition of multiple fault information in the detailed component: (**a**) The new intra-NE simultaneous alarms signals (color, size, and LOD depends on the severity level) and (**b**) an example configuration of a hybrid case. out by the scalability analysis, but also the applicability of GLANCE in other contexts where the information to be notified satisfies the few basic characteristics identified for the alarms studied so far: (1) Classification along the dimensions of class and severity, and (2) description as tuples of values. While the threshold on simultaneity proved not to be a limitation for the specific optical fiber networks the company had to deal with (given typical topology and number of elements of such networks), the scalability analysis suggested that extensions were advisable to obtain a broader applicability, both in more general TLC networks and in additional domains. In a generalizability perspective, the ultimate objective was the capability of _notifying alerts/updates from different heterogeneous information channels_, each potentially generating a high number of notifications. Moving from the specific TLC network application domain to general application domains, the limitations dictated by the scalability analysis on the number of involved network elements and on the number of alarms active in the same network element can be reformulated as limitations on the _number of different channels_ and on the _update rate of individual channels_, with an impact on the display efficacy. A first natural extension is the introduction of _hierarchization mechanisms_ with the twofold positive effect of mirroring the customary hierarchical organization of several real application domains (e.g., news organized by topics) and providing a mechanism that possibly breaks down complex cases into smaller more manageable pieces (e.g., traffic information on Italian highways may be dispatched on a regional basis), as well as in the primary application domain of the study (e.g., a TLC may be structured in smaller subnetworks). A first redesign step was hence aimed at studying _new overviewing mechanisms for simultaneous alerts_, oriented to information classification and hierarchization, general enough and orthogonal, to be selected and possibly combined so as to adapt the display to channels to dispatch. The GLANCE extension was based on the following assumptions:  
* To conform to previous design choices regarding the synthetic component partitioning,
* To organize the \"notification space\" into simpler sub-spaces so to have a lower probability that a single sub-space exceeds the threshold,
* To display the status of one sub-space at the time, and
* To offer mechanisms to switch among sub-spaces. The two newly introduced orthogonal mechanisms are _horizontal scrolling_ and _display tabbing_, built on top of the structure considered so far, each exhibiting pro and cons, supporting respectively the management of homogeneous elements belonging to the same category (e.g., traffic alerts from the highway infrastructure) and of notification spaces organized in distinct categories (e.g., folders of email). Figure 9 illustrates some example scenarios:  
* The display in Figure 9a illustrates a possible use of _horizontal scrolling_ in the case of a highway traffic monitor: Regions with incoming news are treated separately (in the same way of network elements) and shown in sequence, each presenting simultaneous news by customary synthetic component partition (in the same way of alarms generating in the same NE).