# Design and Applications of GLANCE: GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience
### Related Literature  
Notifications can be defined as proactive cues based on (a combination of) visual, auditory, and/or haptic alerts delivering information outside the current user's focus of attention (e.g., [13; 14; 15]). Depending on the kind of static and dynamic stimuli adopted, a notification may behave as a trigger to switch from a primary to a secondary task, with the risk of consequent disruption and user frustration. The design of notification delivery must hence be based on balancing the necessity of keeping the user informed about incoming information and the necessity of minimizing the pervasiveness and invasiveness of notifications (sometimes defined as \"interruptiveness\"). Literature studies on notifications are primarily conducted along two main research lines:  
* Studies on the impact that notifications delivered on single or multiple devices have on a variety of interrelated aspects: Users' performances in primary tasks interrupted by notifications, users' awareness on secondary tasks gained through notifications, and users' frustrations due to task switching;
* Studies on architectural aspects and infrastructures for notification delivery on single or multiple devices are becoming increasingly relevant along with the increasing availability of possibly coordinated connected devices (e.g., [16; 17; 18; 19; 20]). As to the first research line, a great volume of psychology studies on task interruption was stimulated since the 1990s by the growing diffusion of digital communications, revealing the intricacy of related design decisions (see, e.g., [13; 21; 22] for overviews on these studies). None of the interruptions policies (immediate, negotiated, mediated, or scheduled) singled out in [9] proved to be the definitive (and most effective) response to the problem of interrupting users while guaranteeing minimal effects on their performance. A number of studies investigated the effect of notifications and interruptions on users of desktop PC, especially in work environments [21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27]. In particular, the study in [21] was conducted to evaluate the influence of Instant Messaging on memory and performances of the primary task (web search tasks were used in the experiment as primary tasks), showing that the harmful effects of the interruption vary depending on the time of arrival relative to the task's lifecycle (the earlier the stage of the task, the worse the effect). The week-long in situ diary study in [22] was conducted to characterize how people define tasks, and with which granularity, how they interleave multiple tasks among interruptions, and the level of details with which they encode \"task switch\". In particular, the study singled out the factors influencing the perceived difficulty of switching back to tasks and showed that reacquiring \"returned-to\" tasks is considered difficult by users. With the aim of reducing frustrations due to the inopportune moments in which interruptions arrive, the study in [23], based on statistical models, evaluated how the adoption of a notification management system scheduling notification delivery would impact PC users and their tasks with the results showing that users' frustration indeed decreases when adopting defer-to-breakpoint notification policies (hence requiring the detection of adequate breakpoints during interaction tasks). A different approach to the mitigation of \"interruptiveness\" can be found in [24; 25], which evaluated to which extent social strategies (e.g., the use of empathy or of politeness in notification messages) could reduce the negative effects of interruptions. These studies showed that a polite interruption applied in a low cognitive load condition may indeed reduce \"interruptiveness\" but that, on the other hand, empathy can be counter-productive while interrupting a high cognitive load task for being perceived superfluous and more irritating than a neutral message.