Intrusive Evaluation of Ambient Displays

Ambient display is a display, which sits on the peripheral of user’s attention. Currently, the research on ambient displays is still in initial stage, so few evaluation styles are available to evaluate ambient displays. Our previous research (Shen, Eades, Hong, & Moere, 2007) proposed two evaluation styles for ambient displays: Intrusive Evaluation and Non-Intrusive Evaluation. In this journal, we focus on the first style by applying two intrusive evaluation case studies. The first case study compares the performance of three different peripheral display systems on both large and small displays. Our results indicate there is a significant difference on a primary task performance and a peripheral comprehension task between large and small displays. Furthermore, we have found that distraction may be composed by display-distraction and self-interruption, and that animation may only influence the display-distraction. In addition, a measurement of efficiency derived from cognitive science is proposed. The second case study focuses on exploring the correct disruptive order of visual cues (animation, color, area and position). Our results show that the correct disruptive order of visual cues in ambient displays is: animation, color, area and position. Furthermore, we also revealed how display-distraction influences the comprehension of ambient display. In addition, this case study further amended the measurement of efficiency, which was proposed in previous case study, to improve its accuracy.