On Sunday 03 May 2009 03:43:42 am Marco Martin wrote: > On 5/2/09, Celeste Lyn Paul <cele...@kde.org> wrote: > > Some of you may or may not remember that I've also been working on > > interruptions and notifications; however as part of a uni project rather > > than for an open source project. > > > > Part of the project is for designing an empirical experiment to explore > > different features in notifications. I would like to look at features > > which KDE would find useful to make the study more valuable. > > like putting some users in front of different systems and see the > reactions? or a more theoretical thing?
Yes, putting users infront of different features to see which ones are better, etc. More empirical research than usability testing though. > > What types of questions do you regarding notifications? I've seen some > > questions regarding the amount of time a message should be displayed, > > how long a message history should last, etc. > > yeah, interesting questions indeed, also interesting is how much > screen size they can take up before becoming annoying > also what is the better way tp display the history? alongside fresh > notifications? in another interface? Right, these are all things I'd eventually like to look into more, but I can only test a few features at a time without the experimental design becoming insane. > > I'm also thinking about looking at ways we can mediate notifications, > > that is, instead of immediately displaying a notification, assess the > > user and the environment and decide if it would be better to postpone the > > notification for a short time. (For example, if a user currently has a > > context or window menu open, postpone the notification until the menu is > > closed or until n seconds) > > good idea, even if i don't have a clear idea how to do it technically > one could push it as far as delaying the notification until there is a > second without input from the user (or some amount of time passed) > this suggests also dividing notifications by severity or category: > changes the delay poicy or even how they are displayed One guideline I found was that interruptions were more disruptive when users were directly interacting with an application (such as an app menu or context menu). I was trying to find out from the kwin people to see what type of information is available to the environment. I think we can tell when a user has one of those menus open, and so a "mediated" improvement would be to postpone an interruption until the user is out of the menu, or up to n seconds. I would like to test a lot of those sorts of guidelines, because then we can come up with a set of rules for how notifications behave. Even if the effect is small, those small tweaks make the difference between a Good and Great system. -- Celeste Lyn Paul KDE Usability Project usability.kde.org _______________________________________________ Plasma-devel mailing list Plasma-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
