A Framework for Context-Sensitive Coordination of Human Interruptions in Human-Computer Interaction

Recent trends in software development directed toward intelligence, distribution, and mobility need to be followed by an increased sophistication in user interface design. Employment of theoretically sound methods for managing and coordinating complex information, and supporting graceful switching between tasks is especially critical for information-intensive and safety-critical tasks. This paper presents a framework for computer-mediated coordination of human interruptions. As a basis for the framework a new Interruption Taxonomy is outlined to categorize a variety of traceable information needed to exhaustively describe the context space. An exploratory user study is underway to calibrate the kind of benefit gained with the formulated Interruption Model. The expressiveness of the proposed Interruption Model is demonstrated by concretizing the general approach using the particularities of the selected problem domain. The initial results have shown that taxonomy-based coordination of interruption resulted in statistically significant improvement of the primary task resumption time.