Interruption of people in human-computer interaction

Abstract

Just because something is new and clever does not necessarily mean that it is good. The utility of a technology must be evaluated strictly in terms of whether it actually helps people succeed. A new technology that is useful for isolated tasks may carry an invisible and costly sideeffect like interrupting people. However, the side-effect of human interruption by machine only manifests itself in real world contexts where people normally perform several complex heterogeneous tasks in parallel. The telephone and email are examples. They are useful by themselves, but in a real work environment they also create annoying interruptions. A newer and more problematic example is the technology of semi-autonomous computer systems such as intelligent agents. These systems can be assigned to do useful things in the background while their human users work on other tasks. However, delegating a task requires supervising a task; and whenever an intelligent agent must initiate an interaction with its us...

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