Computer screen pop-ups may slow down your work more than you think, according to new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Although the actual interruption may only last a few moments, the study shows that we then lose more time when we try to find our place and resume the task that was interrupted.

The research, led by Dr Helen Hodgetts and Professor Dylan Jones at Cardiff University, examined the cost of on-screen interruptions in terms of the time taken to complete a simple seven-step computer task.

The researchers found that, even after only a five second interruption, people take longer than normal to complete the next step in the task they are working on.

“The interruption breaks our cognitive focus on the task in hand, so we have to work out where we were up to and what we were planning to do next before we can resume the task at our original speed” explains Dr Hodgetts.

The interruptions only caused a few seconds delay in resuming the simple task set in the experiments but in a more realistic work environment, where there is more information to retrieve after the interruption, the loss of concentration could have a greater impact on work performance.

“Our findings suggest that even seemingly brief and inconsequential on-screen pop-up messages might be impacting upon our efficiency, particularly given their frequency over the working day,” says Dr Hodgetts.

Other results from the study show that an interruption lag – a brief time between a warning for an upcoming interruption and the interruption itself- can reduce the time we lose trying to find our place again

A warning sound was found to be most effective because it allows us to consolidate where we are in the current task before transferring our attention to the interruption. In contrast, a flashing warning signal on the computer screen can be just as disruptive as the interruption itself

The benefits of having time to rehearse our place or lay down mental ‘cues’ to help us back to where we were in a task (before we divert our attention to deal with an interruption) has practical implications for the design of computer pop-ups.

The researchers suggest that e-mail alerts and similar pop-up messages should be as small and discrete as possible and should not obscure the original activity. Better still, any visual alert should disappear after a few seconds if not responded to, so that we can be aware that there is incoming information without having to interrupt our current task.

The researchers also point out obvious practical steps that computer users can take to minimise unscheduled pop-up notifications, particularly whilst engaging in tasks that require a lot of planning or concentration:

Instant-messenger systems should be turned off or at least set to ‘busy’ so that colleagues are aware that unimportant interruptions are not welcome; and e-mail alerts could be turned off or only enabled for messages that the sender tags specifically as high priority.

Sending science down the phone

Scientists from the University of Bath have helped to develop new mobile phone software that will help epidemiologists and ecologists working in the field to analyse their data remotely and map findings across the world without having to return to the lab.

Dr Ed Feil and PhD student Fadaa al Own from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry, working with academics from Imperial College, say the software will also enable members of the public to act as ‘citizen scientists’ and help collect data for community projects.

The researchers have developed an application for ’smartphones’ that allows a scientist or member of the public to collect and record data, photos and videos – for example to document the presence of an animal or plant species – and then send this information to a central web-based database. The website records the user’s location, using the phone’s GPS system, and it can then display all of the data collected on this topic across the world, using Google Maps.

Users can also use their smartphones to request and view all the maps and analyses available. The new technology, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust, means that groups of researchers should be able to quickly and easily build up and share maps of, for example, the distribution of an endangered species or cases of a disease, and analyse patterns that emerge. The Imperial team is currently using the software, known as EpiCollect, as a tool in their studies of the epidemiology of bacterial and fungal infectious diseases.

Dr Ed Feil said: “This is a very exciting project and opens up all sorts of possibilities for amateurs, research scientists, and teachers alike, by exploiting the sophisticated features of mobile phone technology.”

The technology has already been used by Dr Nick Waterfield, also from the University’s Department of Biology & Biochemistry to study nematode worms, which are pathogenic to insects, from various sites throughout Thailand.

The researchers suggest that members of the public could also get involved in scientific research using the tool and that schools could also use the software, for example on biology field courses.

Suitable smartphones for EpiCollect use the Android open-source operating system, developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It means that software developers can produce their own applications to run on the phones and anybody can download the software for free. There are currently several different handsets available in the UK and the new software will be available to anybody with one of these phones. The researchers have also produced a beta version for the iPhone, so the software will soon be available to even more people.

In order to use the new system, a researcher sets up a web database for their particular study and a specific version of EpiCollect is produced that can be loaded on multiple phones, allowing users to start collecting and submitting data.

Dr Ed Feil and Fadaa al Own are two of five authors of the study that was published in PLoS One.