Awareness Displays and Interruptions in Teams

Abstract

Work life is filled with interruptions, most of which benefit the interrupter more than the one being interrupted. This problem is greatest with remote collaboration, because team members interrupt blindly, without contextual cues about partners' availability. Awareness displays are designed to provide distributed workers with up-to-date status information about their group members. We describe a pair of laboratory experiments conducted to determine whether awareness displays containing information about a remote collaborator's workload aids in timing interruptive communication. Results indicate that such displays can be useful in coordinating communication, but only when the interrupter has motivation to use the display. Our results also indicate that the attentional demand of the awareness displays themselves need to be taken into consideration, because too much detail may distract the person viewing the display from their primary task. In this study, participants spent significantly more time looking at the most detailed-filled displays and these displays harmed their task performance. We conclude that a display with an abstract representation of a collaborator's workload is best; it leads to better timing of interruptions without overwhelming the person viewing the display.

Keywords: Electronic communication, virtual work, interruption, awareness, computer mediated communication, computer supported cooperative work, instant messaging