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Reducing Interruptions at Work: A Large-Scale Field Study of FlowLight

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Due to the high number and cost of interruptions at work, several approaches have been suggested to reduce this cost for knowledge workers. These approaches predominantly focus either on a manual and physical indicator, such as headphones or a closed office door, or on the automatic measure of a worker's interruptibilty in combination with a computer-based indicator. Little is known about the combination of a physical indicator with an automatic interruptibility measure and its long-term impact in the workplace. In our research, we developed the FlowLight, that combines a physical traffic-light like LED with an automatic interruptibility measure based on computer interaction data. In a large-scale and long-term field study with 449 participants from 12 countries, we found, amongst other results, that the FlowLight reduced the interruptions of participants by 46%, increased their awareness on the potential disruptiveness of interruptions and most participants never stopped using it.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 02 May 2017

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    1. automatic interruptibility measure
    2. awareness
    3. field study
    4. interruption cost
    5. knowledge worker
    6. physical indicator

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2024)A Systematic Review of Biometric Monitoring in the Workplace: Analyzing Socio-technical Harms in Development, Deployment and UseProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3658945(920-932)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
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    • (2023)User-Centered Investigation of Features for Attention Management Systems in an Online Vignette StudyProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3626705.3627766(108-121)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2023
    • (2023)MuM'23 Workshop on Interruptions and Attention ManagementProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3626705.3626706(548-551)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2023
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