I'm in the process of designing and testing various ideas for an application whose main functionality will be to notify users of occurring events and offer them with a choice of actions for each.
The standard choice would be to create a queue of events showing a popup in the taskbar with the events and actions, but I want this tool to be the less intrusive and disrupting as possible.
What I'm after is a good book or papers on studies of how to maximize user productivity in these intrinsically disruptive scenarios (in other words, how to achieve the perfect degree of annoying-ness, not too much, not too little).
The user is supposedly interested in these events, they subscribe to them and can choose the actions to perform on each.
I prefer books and papers, but the usual StackOverflow wisdom is appreciated as well.
I'm after things like:
- Don't use popups, use instead X
- Show popups at most 3 seconds
- Show them in the left corner
- Use color X because it improves readability and disrupts less
That is, cognitive aspects of GUI design that would help users in such a scenario.
Best Answer
For notification, I prefer small notification windows in the bottom right corner. If they have a minimum UI allowing me to take some quick action, it would be ideal.
As model: incoming mail notification from Outlook, Skype notifications for incomming calls, etc.