Interruptions as multimodal outputs: which are the less disruptive?

Abstract

This paper describes exploratory studies of interruption modalities and disruptiveness. Five interruption modalities were compared: heat, smell, sound, vibration, and light. Much more notable than the differences between modalities was the differences between people. We found that subjects' sensitiveness depended on their previous life exposure to the modalities. Individual differences greatly control the effect of interrupting stimuli. We show that is possible to build a multimodal adaptive interruption interface, such interfaces would dynamically select the output interruption modality to use based on its effectiveness on a particular user.