A customizable glanceable peripheral display for monitoring and accessing information from multiple channels

Abstract

Nowadays the availability of virtually infinite information sources over the web makes information overload a severe problem to be addressed by tools able to aggregate and deliver information from selected channels in a personalized way. The support provided by portals (e.g., iGoogle) forces users to abandon primary tasks to monitor useful information. Feed readers are sometimes based on peripheral notifications that do not interfere with primary tasks but are often mostly textual. In this paper we present a customizable glanceable peripheral display able to aggregate notifications from multiple sources (e.g., email, news, weather forecast) as well as to provide quick access to information sources. The design is based on state-of-the-art guidelines and on preliminary usability studies conducted at mockup level both on the abstract model and on its realization. © Springer-Verlag 2011.