# Design and Applications of GLANCE: GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience
## 3 Results of the 1 st Macro-Phase: The GLANCE Project
### First Iteration: Dealing with Individual Alarms
#### 3.1.1 Definition of the Abstract Model and Application to the Organizational Situation  
The basic idea was to conceive the notifier as an _in-desktop peripheral display_ located in the bottom-right corner of the primary monitor, outside the primary visual focus, occupying a fixed rectangular area small enough to be also possibly displayed on hand-held mobile devices or on ad-hoc (wearable) devices (studies have shown that small displays result in fast identification of changing information [37]). By default, the display behaves like an ambient display, continuously visualizing non-critical information without demanding the full attention of users, but as soon as a critical notification arrives, it turns to an alerting display. In particular:  
* Low severity alarms are associated with a few data conveyed in a subliminal way, whereas;
* More urgent alarms are associated with notifications requiring focal attention and technical intervention,  
by adapting the visual coding technique and the transition strategy to the severity level. Given their distinct responsibilities with respect to the IRC framework, the definition of these two components were addressed separately. In both cases the approach was to define general abstract rules and then apply them to the specific problem at hand. _The GLANCE visual coding technique._ As observed in the Introduction, one of the basic choices behind GLANCE is to abandon a unified notification format (adopted, e.g., in customary notification badges in PC desktops or smartphones) in favor of an adaptive format, taking into account the severity degree of the notification. The final objective is a _glanceable display_ able to automatically convey quickly understandable but minimum and specific information (with respect to the severity) without requiring any user action. In order to ensure glanceability, the visual coding technique is based on visual variables (color, shape, size, position, and contrast). More specifically, the basic GLANCE general abstract schema is defined as a rectangular display partitioned into three sub-areas (see Figure 3):  
* An upper bar contains temporal information on the displayed alarm,
* A lower bar is reserved to user data, and
* A middle area contains information about the currently active alarm and is in turn divided into a _synthetic component_ and a _detailed component_: The former informs about the alarm severity by a combination of textual and sensorial information (label and color), while the latter visualizes the alarm description with the background color and the LOD associated to the severity, conveying the minimum amount of information necessary for the severity level and getting progressively denser information while the alarm severity increases. _Application to the specific problem situation._ As mentioned in Section 2.2, each alarm is described by a tuple of data item. As to LOD, three levels were judged appropriate, determining a ranking of the attributes of the tuple schema, as illustrated by Table 4. Alarms with a different severity level and same LOD will be differentiated by the values of retinal variables and the transition types. Figure 4a shows how the five levels of severity are mapped onto three abstract schemata according to the LOD conventions of Table 4. In the case of critical alarms, the quantity of data items associated to the corresponding LOD3 (cause, location, and sublocation) requires the utilization of a string ticker with the beneficial side effect that a dynamic stimulus-like ticker animation will grab users' attention coherently with a high severity alarm (additional dynamic stimuli will be determined by the transition strategy, discussed later on). Examples of alarm visualizations with different severity are depicted in Figure 4b, illustrating the roles of icons to represent alarm class and background color to represent severity (it is worth recalling that results on glanceability tests indicate that these two visual properties are the two most popular among users [39]).