A formal model-based approach for designing interruptions-tolerant advanced user interfaces

Abstract

Due to the omnipresence of multitasking features in modern working environments, interruptions become commonplace as users must temporarily suspend a task to complete unexpected intervening activities. Interruptions are unpredictable and cannot be usually disregarded by users. They are quite often associated with negative effects (e.g. resuming to task after interruptions is difficult and is time consuming) but also with positive ones (e.g. alert systems shift our attention to matters that require immediate care to perform adequately a monitoring task). As users are facing more and more sources of information competing for attention, it is important to understand how interruptions affect user abilities to complete tasks. Despite multitasking environments are not new, interruptions are rarely considered explicitly in the design phases of interactive systems. In this chapter, we present how to integrate system models, task models and interruption models within a Model-Driven Approach (MDA). We show how formal descriptions of system and tasks can be used for simulation purposes while assessing system performance and how such simulations can be exploited to understand the consequences of interruptions on users' work. These aspects are illustrated by a case study demonstrating that these simulations can support the assessment of various interaction techniques according to interruption rates. An application of such concepts is also presented in the case of dynamic reconfiguration of the user interface (after hardware or software failures for instance). © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.