Combining social strategies and workload: a new design to reduce the negative effects of task interruptions

Being interrupted by notifications and reminders is common while working. In this study we consider whether system politeness reduces (negative) effects of being interrupted by system requests. We carried out a 2 (polite vs. neutral system request) x 2 (high vs. low mental load) between-participants experiment. We measured annoyance, frustration and mental effort. Our results suggest that social strategies can mitigate some of the negative effects, but that this depends on the difficulty of the task. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of interruptive system messages and for further research into social computing.