Productivity Enhancing Interruption-Information Management Chat Interface

Spontaneous communication is an integral part of any workplace as well as everyday life. In workplaces that use computer or similar devices, most of the spontaneous conversations happen over email or chat. Frequent use of chat application or email disrupts a recipient’s workflow and leads to constant interruptions causing task fragmentation. In this paper, we present a receiver oriented Interruption-Information Management (IIM) chat which incorporates automated agents to prevent receivers from getting a plethora of messages. This framework manages both interruption and forthcoming information in the chat interface. It is a novel approach in the area of interruption management. It not only considers interruption management, but also manages the information based on the users’ behavior and preferences. It is a cooperative approach where both the message sender and the receiver work together to deliver messages during the receiver’s most favorable times. The receiver contributes to manage interruption whereas the sender contributes to manage information, together forming an interruption-information management mechanism to decide the least interruptible time for message delivery.