Reducing Interruption Cost Using Slow-Growth Notifications

Current desktop notifications, such as popup windows, tend to be immediate, interrupting the user suddenly and without regard for the user’s current task, costing productivity and increasing annoyance and anxiety. We propose a new method for delivering desktop notifications, slow-growth notifications, in which a window grows slowly from a point at the periphery of the user’s attention, and smoothly increases in size until the user notices it. Our approach uses continuous semantic zooming to make the growth of the window more subtle. We present a controlled experiment showing that, for typing tasks, slow-growth notifications impose lower interruption costs and produce less user annoyance than popup windows.