Communication Technology: Interruption and Overload

Over the last 50 years there have been dramatic changes in the way we communicate at work. Information and other people are easier to access than ever before. This has led to problems of communication overload, work disruption, and fragmentation. My work seeks to understand the way people attend to communications in work situations to inform the design of tools that increase productivity, and reduce feelings of stress and overload.

In this talk, I will describe a field study examining influences on the decision to attend and respond to email communication. I will also discuss a laboratory study examining the productivity and social implications of awareness displays designed to maintain benefits of connectivity and reduce disruption. Based on results from both studies, I will suggest directions for future research efforts.

Speaker Bios

Laura Dabbish is a doctoral candidate in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.hcii.cs.cmu.edu) with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. She studies Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, focusing on the design and use of communication technologies. She is interested in understanding and addressing problems of attention, interruption, multi-tasking, and overload in the modern workplace. She has been supported in this work by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Research Fellowship.Further information about her research can be found at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dabbish

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
Laura Dabbish
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University