# Design and Applications of GLANCE: GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience
## 6 Conclusions  
In this paper we presented the design evolution of GLANCE, a model for severity-based glanceable notifiers based on a peripheral display approach, to support users in the awareness-interruption trade-off, particularly in the network management application domain or, more generally, in application domains where (a) notification severity plays a crucial role and (b) users need a global overview of incoming notifications. More precisely, the study of customary general approaches to notification management shows that they may be inefficient in the specific application domain of network management systems since they deal with streams of individual notifications displayed one at a time according to a unified format and inserted in lists ordered by the time of arrival without any overview capability. To overcome such limitations, we proposed the different perspective of a notifier that retains the information expressiveness of the one-notification-at-the-time perspective while guiding it by severity-based coding strategies and enriching it with overview capabilities, to guarantee possibly subliminal long-term local and global content comprehension and prompt reaction when the interruption from the foreground task is dictated by fault severity. The design evolution followed a path composed by two macro-phases, respectively focused on model definition and model application. Though the initial goal was domain specific, the achieved design exhibits a level of abstraction that stimulated to investigate its applicability in other contexts, provided that information to be notified satisfies few basic characteristics, both in terms of single notification data and structure of the notification space. Future work will be focused on improving the fit with mobile devices and on more extensively studying the promising case of personal notification aggregator. Nowadays the availability of virtually infinite information sources as well as the pervasiveness of mobile devices makes information overload a severe multifaceted problem requiring solutions that are able to help users cope with a number of dimensions of a different nature: Information growth and diversity, human-to-information interaction, interferences with ordinary working, and private life activities. As pointed out in [72], \"information overload is as much a problem of information diversity, or clutter, as of its quantity\". The paper reported the results of a test conducted with workers in more than 1000 large organizations and when asked which they considered the worse between the quantity of information they have to deal with or its diversity, respondents identified the diversity as the major cause of stress. Though the survey dealt with the general case of mix of digital and paper information, we find it reasonable that lessons learned from it can also be applicable to the case of digital information only. It is therefore appropriate studying tools in helping users deal more efficiently with continuous and diverse incoming information. Conceptualization, L.T., S.D.P., D.A., A.B., and A.C.; methodology, L.T. ; software, D.A., A.C., and A.B. ; validation, L.T. ; formal analysis, L.T., D.A., and A.C.; investigation, D.A., A.B., A.C., S.D.P., and L.T. ; resources, D.A. ; data curation, L.T. ; writing--original draft preparation, L.T., D.A., A.B., A.C., and S.D.P. ; writing--review and editing, L.T., D.A., and S.D.P. ; visualization, L.T., S.D.P. ; supervision, L.T. ; project administration, L.T. ; funding acquisition, L.T. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Work discussed in Section 4.2 was partially supported by Broadcast Solutions S.R.L. within the framework of an agreement with the University of L'Aquila for students' stages.