# 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
To this aim, we conceived, and tested with users, four different solutions (shown in Figure 11), differing in:  
* Visual hints used to indicate the current category (tab metaphor vs. lens metaphor),
* Relative movements of categories and overlapping tabs/lens,
* Scrolling direction of individual notifications within the detailed component of a single category (vertical vs. horizontal). _Experiment design._ The new version of the GLANCE model (denoted GLANCE+) was evaluated by a laboratory-based controlled observational study grounded on a dual-task test similar to the one described in Section 3.3.3. The primary objectives of the study were (1) to evaluate the novelties introduced in GLANCE+ (and hence the glanceability of the new category bar), and (2) to select the solution with the best objective and subjective performances. In this case we did not repeat the evaluation of the mapping between notification levels and transition types, which was considered validated by the results of the previous test. The study was designed to have participants performing a primary text-reading task while, at the same time, monitoring notifications delivered by GLANCE+. In particular, we wanted to measure how distracting the notifications were on the text-reading performance (by user observation and a post-experiment test), how memorable the notifications were (by a post-experiment test), how intuitive the category bar features were (by user observation and a post-experiment test), and how satisfied users were with the different proposed solutions (by a post-experiment test). Notifications to be administered to participants were designed to be credible content of a multichannel notifier including up to six different channels. To evaluate the efficacy and glanceability of the different alternatives, different rounds of dual-tasks tests were designed, including (a) texts different in content but analogous in terms of complexity and (b) notification sequences different in content but analogous in terms of kinds of notifications and display changes (to compare the different solutions under the same conditions in terms of user familiarity with the content). Notice that for the same solution, two scenarios were designed, differing in the  
Figure 10: The new _category bar_: (**a**) Its organization, and (**b**) an example of status sensitive icon. number of channels included: One scenario with a number of channels not requiring the scrolling of the horizontal bar and another scenario with a number of channels exceeding the number of visible channels in the category bar and hence requiring horizontal scrolling. Experiment sessionsA total of 10 participants (five female) aged 18-50 (AVG = 32.9; M = 32.5), heterogenous with respect to technical skill, recruited among students and personnel of the university campus, participated in the study on a voluntary basis (one participant was an undergraduate student, two participants were Master students, two were PhD students, two were technicians, and three were employees not using computers for their jobs). None of the recruited users participated in previous evaluation sessions of GLANCE. Participants were invited individually to the lab and were given a brief introduction to the experiment. A facilitator gave a description of GLANCE features and explained to the users what they were requested to do, what they would be observed for, and how data collected from the study would be used. Then each user underwent different dual-task rounds corresponding to different category bar design alternatives, with the order of the design alternatives assigned randomly to each user, again to compare the different solutions under the same conditions in terms of user familiarity with the content and display. As in the previous usability test, in this case participants were also not instructed on how to prioritize the two parallel tasks nor were they preliminarily informed about the speed with which the notifier would update.