Designing and Evaluating Glanceable Peripheral Displays

Multitasking is an important part of the way we work, but serious problems result from fragmenting our work with constant interruptions and task switches. Imagine an interface that helps you maintain task focus, keep up to date with changes in secondary tasks, and smoothly transition between tasks. Glanceable peripheral displays can help with these needs by enabling users to quickly and easily monitor updates in various tasks. However, little is known about how to best design visual information to improve user experience and performance in multitasking situations. To address this question, I will present three experiments that study design characteristics of glanceable peripheral displays used while multitasking. In the first experiment, we compared the effects of different abstraction techniques used in peripheral displays on multitasking efficiency. In the second and third dual-task experiments, we compared the interpretability, recognizability, and user opinions of a wide range of renditions (from colored squares to photographs), inspired by existing displays. We also investigated how recognizable renditions are together in cohesive sets, and how this changed with different set sizes. The main contributions are best practices for the design and evaluation of glanceable peripheral displays, intended to help designers create better displays to support multitasking.