# Design and Applications of GLANCE: GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience
###### Abstract  
The trade-off between awareness and interruption is a crucial aspect in network fault notifiers: Low severity alarms should not distract operators from other primary tasks, however it might be crucial that operators promptly react to critical notifications. A notification system should hence determine when a particular interruption is appropriate and how it should be presented. In this direction, this paper presents a multistep design path beginning from the objective of designing a proof-of-concept for a glanceable alarm notification component for telecommunication network management systems based on a peripheral display approach. In particular the goal was a notifier guided by severity-based strategies and offering the information expressiveness of a one-notification-at-the-time perspective while enriching it with overview capabilities to guarantee (possibly subliminal) long-term local and global content comprehension and prompt reaction only when the interruption from the foreground task is dictated by the fault severity. A first design macro-phase led to the simple yet effective GLANCE (GLanceable Alarm Notification for a User Centered Experience) model, based on a visual coding technique oriented to comprehension and reaction, and a transition strategy oriented to interruptions and reaction. A second design macro-phase studied the application of GLANCE to a personal customizable multichannel notification tool and to a service-oriented fault monitor for digital terrestrial television broadcasting networks.  
information visualization; notification systems; peripheral displays 2021  
11669  
L'Aquila, Italy  
1 Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics, University of L'Aquila, Via Vetoh, 67100 L'Aquila, Italy1  
to interrupt the primary task only when necessary at the right moment, while mobility-oriented fault notification is often based on email or SMS, forcing operators to interrupt their activities to read the message, check the alarm severity, and access (textual) information about the alarm description.  
The cost-benefit trade-off between awareness and interruption is a crucial aspect [5]: Interruptions unrelated to the primary task may negatively influence task performance and affective state, leading to longer task completion times, higher error rates, and increased frustration [5; 6; 7; 8] and, on the other hand, studies have proven that when users are offered the possibility of negotiating the receipt of notifications they tend to an indefinite postpement [9], with a resulting inability to get the right information at the right time [7; 10; 11], which would be highly harmful when the recipient of the notification is expected to be responsible for some relevant action in response. For example, the study discussed in [12] shows how, in a clinical environment, sending digital notifications with reminders of incoming appointments to patients greatly improves the efficiency of health care services by increasing attendance and sensibly reducing the number of \"no shows\". Similarly, in contexts like network management, of interest for this paper, task switching in response to a fault alert may be mandatory when the operator must promptly react and take charge of a critical request, while being inappropriate in case of low severity faults. Furthermore, since more than one alarm can be \"active\" (i.e., raised and not acknowledged yet) in the network in a given moment, it is advisable that network management notifiers be able to also offer a global overview of all incoming active alarms. In the remainder of this section we provide a brief overview on some issues affecting the design of notification delivery, singling out the motivations behind the proposed study, and outlining research questions and the overall structure of the study.