We are happy to announce that Frank Bolton’s paper, “Can Previews Mitigate the Effect of Interruptions? Findings from a Lab Experiment under Various Workloads”, was recently accepted by the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. The paper is available to download here, and the full citation is:

Frank John Bolton, Dov Te’eni & Eran Toch (2022): Can Previews Mitigate the Effect of Interruptions? Findings from a Lab Experiment under Various Workloads, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2022.2137915

The paper asks a simple question: do message previews help people cope with interruptions when they are really busy? While previews have been used to increase engagement, research on their potential to mitigate the effect of interruptions is scarce.

To answer this question, Frank built an online experiment environment called Pet Hospital, where the users play a game where they have to take care of some sick animals… The more animals the user needs to take care of, the heavier the workload.

In the experiment, users (n=62) played this game while being interrupted by messages, some of them were useful for the game, and some were just distractions. The number of animals was randomly changing between the game periods, and after each period, the participants reported their mental load state using standard scales. The participants were randomly divided into two groups: some had received previews for the interruptions and could decide whether to open them, and some did not.

We found that previews added less to participants’ mental load but did not improve their overall performance. People felt that they had a less mental load, but the effect on their actual task was non-significant. These results were consistent in all levels of task load.