Lost in Email

Hanrahan, Benjamin V.; Pérez-Quiñones, Manuel A.

doi:10.1145/2702123.2702351

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Interview results suggest that common reasons for interruptions being longer than anticipated were distractions and chains of diversion [15,17], where the user further self-interrupts for other tasks. Participants tried to avoid interruptions during work that were completely unrelated, but after they had interrupted themselves for work purposes, there were opportunities to further self-interrupt for other off-task activities.…”

Section: Awareness Of Interruption Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…Most experimental studies on self-interruptions have used an artificial distraction, such as chat messages, to measure how people self-interrupt to attend to this distracting task [21,38]. Study 3 makes a methodological contribution by using participants' own personal email inbox as an interruption, based on the assumption that email provides a natural source of distraction [15,32]. Participants could complete the study at any time.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These distractions may make it difficult for people to be aware of the time that they actually spend on these interruptionsas a result, it is difficult for people to manage them effectively. The tendency to attend to irrelevant information is similar to so-called chains of diversion, where the user diverts from the current task and forgets the original objective [15,17]. Previous work has explored tools that aim to prevent these diversions during a task, for example by enabling users to group windows needed for the same task [39] and disable switches to distracting sources [22].…”

Section: Distracted By Other Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, participants had multiple computer screens and kept the majority of documents, browse windows and applications open on their work computer, even after they had finished with them. These windows were a further source of distraction if participants were trying to find task-related information in one of the windows: 'It's like 15 When working in the office, participants tried to complete tasks that required focused attention in the morning. They were more easily distracted in the afternoon, as they received more external interruptions from sources such as email, phone calls, and colleagues.…”

Section: Different Work Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

TimeToFocus

Borghouts

Brumby

Cox

2020

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

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Many computer tasks involve looking up information from different sources. Such interruptions to a task can be disruptive. In this paper, we investigate whether giving people feedback on how long they are away from their task influences their self-interruption behaviour. We conducted a contextual inquiry on self-interruption behaviour in an office workplace. Participants were observed to postpone physical interruptions until a convenient moment in the task if they were expected to take time. In contrast, observations revealed that digital interruptions were addressed immediately; participants reported these were presumed to be quick to deal with. To increase awareness of time spent on interruptions, we developed TimeToFocus, a notification tool showing people the duration of their interruptions. A field study deployment of TimeToFocus in an office workplace found that feedback on the duration of interruptions made participants reflect on what they were doing during interruptions. They reported that they used this insight to avoid task-irrelevant activities. To confirm whether participants' perceptions of the benefit of the tool could be measured, we conducted an online experiment, where participants had to retrieve information from an email sent to their personal email addresses and enter it into a spreadsheet. Participants who used our tool made shorter interruptions, completed the spreadsheet task faster, and made fewer data entry errors. We conclude that feedback on the length of interruptions can assist users in focusing on their primary task and thus improve productivity. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.

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Section: Awareness Of Interruption Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distracted By Other Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Different Work Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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TimeToFocus

Borghouts

Brumby

Cox

2020

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

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“…"You have 12 new posts on your wall!") provide instant gratification and are difficult to not follow-up [10]. It is not uncommon to get out a smartphone in order to quickly check the time, only to find oneself reading friends's recent Facebook posts.…”

Section: Fewer Task Distractionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Raising Awareness of IoT Sensor Deployments

Mikusz

Houben

Davies

et al. 2018

Living in the Internet of Things: Cybersecurity of the IoT - 2018

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The IoT is increasingly being used to support smart spaces and physical analytics and yet much of this smartness is made deliberately invisible to the user-echoing Weiser's vision of calm computing and technology that fades into the background. However, this means that users may not be aware or may not understand how the IoT is being deployed in their area. In other domains we know that a lack of awareness and a lack of understanding can lead to poor user experience/frustration, mistrust, suspicion, inability to capitalise on benefits and, security vulnerabilities. In this paper we present preliminary work that explores the issue of user awareness of IoT-based data collection.

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