Self-Initiated Intermission: A Better Way of Handling Interrupting Events

The aspect of handling interruption plays a vital role in human computer interaction. Interruptions become disruptive when they occur at inappropriate times. This is the reason that researchers are paying more attention towards predicting interruptions and their effects over the past few decades. We came up with an idea of finding self-initiated intermission to realize fewer distraction in human-computer interaction. Self-initiated intermission is an initiation to report oneself as being available for interaction. It gives the privilege of choosing appropriate time to handle interruptions, so that it would not hamper the current active tasks. Along with self-initiated intermission, interruptibility levels at the time of application switching and at regular intervals are studied. Then, the interruptibility levels in these three conditions are compared to find the most appropriate moment for handling interrupting events. The study shows that self-initiated intermission is the best moment for interrupting user which is less annoying than at the time of application switching and at regular intervals. Keywords–self-initiated intermission; interruption; regular intervals; application switching.