# Design and Applications of GLANCE: GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience
## 3 Results of the 1 st Macro-Phase: The GLANCE Project
### Second Iteration: Dealing with Multiple Alarms
#### 3.2.2 Evaluation and Learning
Furthermore, the evaluation revealed usability flaws concerning the utilization of flags for the visualization of multiple alarms in the same NE, due to both possible color overlapping (readability flaw) and selection difficulty should the flags become the interactive elements, allowing to access individual alarm data (accessibility flaw). Furthermore, the GLANCE approach was again compared with the approach of the Scope display, notwithstanding the greater overview capacity offered by the abstractness and conciseness of Scope, in this case domain experts judged GLANCE more appropriate with respect to the application domain, observing that, in the tradeoff between overview and details, sacrificing some overview capacity is absolutely well outbalanced by the advantage of the immediate availability of alarm data in change-blind, ambient, and alerting modes based on the status of the network. It was also appreciated that GLANCE preserves the visibility of the overview in all cases, while in Scope the overview is hidden when a high severity notification arrives. Despite the detected usability flaw and observation about possible interactive capability, Technolabs people were so satisfied with the overall results that a half-day company workshop was organized to share project results with company managers and company laboratory staff. The workshop included a seminar on ambient and alerting systems and peripheral displays, the presentation of the GLANCE model, a demo of the developed proof-of-concept based on the same notification sequence used for the evaluation session, and a final brainstorming with workshop participants. About 40 people participated in the meeting and gave feedback. Company people reactions to the proof-of-concept demo provided additional evaluation elements, with a clear confirmation of the notifier suitability at provoking reactions correctly depending on the alarm severity. We noticed that although at this stage of the study the association of Table 5 (mapping severity levels to consolidated attention types/transition types) was still to be formally evaluated, it was somehow expected that users' reactions would be correct, being dynamic stimuli based on state-of-the-art consolidated results [38]. A number of company employees, in particular, underlined the reaction urgency provoked by the dynamic stimuli associated to high severity alarms (which is actually one of the main objectives for the notifier component of a TLC network management system) while many appreciated the \"policteness\" of the display in the case of low-to-medium severity alarms. The User-Based Evaluation to Identify the Overview Readability Threshold  
As to the _user-based evaluation_, prior to a test specifically devoted to validate the mapping in Table 5, it was crucial to measure the glanceability and scalability of the solution singled out for overview, so as to provide an objective answer to research question R1 (_\"To which extent is it possible to offer a glanceable overview along with information on individual faults?\"_) and inform successive steps of the study. It has to be observed that the decision to assign to the synthetic component the role of global overview makes it the most critical part of the display. In fact, if the widths of individual areas in the synthetic component become too small, the discernibility of individual alarm severity may be jeopardized for two reasons: On the one side, size is a dissociative visual variable that, for low values, affects the perception of colors, and, on the other side, heavy simultaneity increases the probability that contiguous colors do not contrast enough. Furthermore, it may become difficult to grasp in a glanceable way the number of incoming alarms. The proposed solution is hence efficient when the number of simultaneous alarms remains below a given threshold. _Experiment design_. To identify the readability threshold, we performed a usability study at a mockup level based on sample configurations of working cases.