Assessment of Social Roles for Interruption Management: A New Concept in the Field of Interruptibility
This addresses the challenge of effective interruption management in ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing psychological theories without demonstrating broad impact.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying opportune moments for interruptions in computing by proposing a new concept based on social roles and psychology, resulting in a prototype system architecture for enhanced interruption management.
Determining and identifying opportune moments for interruptions is a challenging task in Ubiquitous Computing and Human-Computer-Interaction. The current state-of-the-art approaches do this by identifying breakpoints either in user tasks, activities or by processing social relationships and contents of interruptions. However, from a psychological perspective, not all of these breakpoints represent opportune moments for interruptions. In this paper, we propose a new concept in the field of interruptibility. The concept is based on role theory and psychological interruption research. In particular, we argue that social roles which define sets of norms, expectations, rules and behaviours can provide useful information about the user's current context that can be used to enhance interruption management systems. Based on this concept, we propose a prototype system architecture that uses social roles to detect opportune moments for interruptions.