Providing Awareness of Multiple Notifications at a Glance

Goal

The Scope is a glanceable notification summarizer. We have designed this simple information visualization tool to help unify notifications and reduce distractions  for the user, thus avoiding notification overload. The Scope allows users to remain aware of notifications from multiple sources of information, including e-mail, instant messaging, information alerts, and appointments. The design employs a circular radar-like screen divided into sectors that group different kinds of notifications. The more urgent a notification is, the more centrally it is placed. Visual emphasis and annotation is used to reveal important properties of notifications. Several natural gestures allow users to zoom in on particular regions and to selectively drill down on items.

A primary design goal for the Scope was to provide a tool for safeguarding a user’s attention. We sought designs that could empower users to stay focused on their primary task, requiring minimal attention to stay aware of incoming notifications and pending tasks.

The Scope is a novel visualization and application that helps people manage the increasing numbers of notifications from multiple applications. We believe that the Scope represents a new direction of research on information visualization for awareness. The Scope unifies many notification sources, providing a single interface for users to “stay on top” of their work and communication. By bringing visual design and information visualization techniques to the interface design, we have created an application that is highly glanceable, reducing the mental effort users have to spend to decide what to attend to. Initial usability results suggest that while the Scope is not immediately intuitive to grasp, information workers come to understand it in a brief session, and appreciate its functionality. We believe that, as users increasingly experience notification overload, designs like the Scope will become increasingly valuable.

Automatic Ranking

The Scope takes advantage of the Notification Platform and the Priorities system for automatically ranking different notifications. These systems learn models of prioritization of items from user behaviors or from explicit user feedback, and uses these models to automatically assign an urgency score based on multiple facets of items, including, for the case of email, the sender, the nature and number of recipients, and the content of the header and body of messages.