Creating Awareness with Subscription Services (CASS) Strategy

Defining Awareness Style

1. Intrusive vs. peripheral dimension: how intrusive/disruptive is the presentation of new awareness information? Highly intrusive would be a strident beeping, or popping up a modal dialog box and requiring that the user deal with the message containing new information before they move on with their work. Peripheral means that new information is communicated using peripheral senses, primarily vision and sound, and in certain environments tactile. For example, an animations placed in a user's peripheral vision can make a person aware of information without them even looking at it, or it can make them aware that there is information and of the nature of the information so that they can decide whether or not to look at it. Sound can be effective for communicating constantly changing conditions. The where possible, awareness tools should be non-disruptive but should still communicate the nature of the information that has arrived.
2. Mobility dimension: Can the awareness tool be moved from one computer to another as a person's work moves through a building? Can it use mobile devices, can it be used while taking the train to work? Or is this an awareness style that requires more computing or display resources? Perhaps its presentation style requires constant user attention that can only be given when in a work setting.
3. Information Representation dimension: What kinds of information does the representation of the information focus upon? Different types of graphs, animations, and other representations of information focus on illuminating certain aspects of information.
4. Cognitive Effort dimension: How much effort is needed to interpret the representation? A highly abstract and general tool may require more interpretative effort from the user than a more focused, less general tool. There are highly complex visualization tools available can be very helpful in interpreting data but which have a steep learning curve, and may require more than a quick glance from typical users to obtain meaningful information.