Peripheral interaction: characteristics and considerations

Abstract

In everyday life, we are able to perceive information and perform physical actions in the background or periphery of attention. Inspired by this observation, several researchers have studied interactive systems that display digital information in the periphery of attention. To broaden the scope of this research direction, a few recent studies have focused on interactive systems that can not only be perceived in the background but also enable users to physically interact with digital information in their periphery. Such peripheral interaction designs can support computing technology to fluently embed in and become a meaningful part of people's everyday routines. With the increasing ubiquity of technology in our everyday environment, we believe that this direction is highly relevant nowadays. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of three case studies on peripheral interaction. These case studies involved the design and development of peripheral interactive systems and deployment of these systems in the real context of use for a number of weeks. Based on the insights gained through these case studies, we discuss generalized characteristics and considerations for peripheral interaction design and evaluation. The aim of the work presented in this paper is to support interaction design researchers and practitioners in anticipating and facilitating peripheral interaction with the designs they are evaluating or developing.

WaitSuite

“…Peripheral Interaction. Peripheral interaction aims to enable everyday interactions that can meaningfully and effortlessly blend into daily routines, by supporting shifts between the periphery and the center of attention [Bakker et al 2015;Edge and Blackwell 2016]. Facilitating peripheral interactions requires taking into account the user's context and understanding the mental resources required in existing routines.…”

“…Manner of Appearance. Peripheral interactions should be designed so that they are easyto-initiate and easy-to-discard [Bakker et al 2015]. Thus, the learning task should appear subtly at the periphery of the user's attention, and should also require little effort to ignore.…”

Facilitating peripheral interaction: design and evaluation of peripheral interaction for a gesture-based lighting control with multimodal feedback

“…However, and outside the scope of this particular study, in real-life people will vary in their abilities to learn new routine activities and unlearn existing routines, and peripheral interaction will be more easily facilitated for some people than for others [5]. For example, we found some indications that three people in our study who were above the age of 40 performed some tasks differently from the rest of the group.…”

“…Also, while the content of the information remains constant, people move around in real-life environments, which can result in, e.g., auditory feedback being perceived differently depending on the distance between the user and the sound source in their home. In order to truly design for peripheral interaction for everyday activities, it is important to understand the context of use, e.g., by evaluating different types of (social) situations and how these would affect the necessary feedback [5]. However, especially because of the diversity of (social) situations, applying multimodal feedback (including visual feedback) can be even more convenient.…”

Wobble

“…Instead we believe that reminders that are easier to ignore than traditional reminders can be presented more often, and may be picked up by users when they are more open to be reminded. To evaluate these sorts of reminders we build on the concept of 'peripheral interaction' [2]. We aim to apply peripheral interaction to the design of a reminding application and explore how unobtrusive reminders for cued intentions are experienced in the home context.…”