Using Salience Differentials to Making Visual Cues Noticeable

There is a large body of research on how to design user interfaces for systems so as to ensure that important messages from the systems are presented to the user to maximize the probability that the user notices, and acts on, the messages. Nevertheless in security-related applications on general-purpose computer systems in use today, there is significant evidence that users routinely ignore system messages. We discuss possible reasons for this state of affairs, and propose a potential approach to improve it. Noticeability of messages depends on the salience with which they are displayed. We propose that given a message, the required salience differential for its display can be calculated as a function of the relevance of the message and the confidence with which the relevance was determined. This approach has wide applicability and can be used for making visual cues more noticeable in a variety of applications such as security indicators and recommendations in automated recommendation...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: NSDI
• Authors: Andreas P. Heiner, N. Asokan
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Important Messages, NSDI 2008, User Interfaces, User Notices