Designing Alerts to Direct Attention

Many of the alerts monitoring systems send us are primitive capture events lacking useful context that can aid our response. In this presentation I discuss joint cognitive systems, humans’ executive functions, and recommend ideas that challenge the audience to think about designing their alerts to support humans’ mental abilities.

A long form version of this topic is available in my post Designing Alerts to Direct Attention.

Slides

Video

Monitorama BAL 2019 - Ryan Frantz - Designing Alerts to Direct Attention from Monitorama on Vimeo.

References

The following papers and books influenced this presentation and are well worth a read (or several):

• Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
  • After reading that book I wrote up my thoughts in Systems Thinking in Practice.
• The Alarm Problem and Directed Attention Dynamic Fault Management by David Woods
• Cognitive Systems Engineering: New wine in new bottles by Erik Hollnagel and David Woods
• Designing for Joint Cognitive Systems by Erik Hollnagel
• Joyce Cooper-Kahn and Dr. Laurie Dietzel on executive functions.