The more you plan interruptions, the less interruptive they become

5 min readJun 20, 2021

I noticed how often people get interrupted during their work, myself included. I was sure that some proper needfinding would reveal some opportunities to fulfill my mission:

Redesign the way we experience or interact with time.

Are people interrupted by external factors? Are the interruptions work related? Are the interruptions initiated by the people themselves? Do the interruptions influence their productivity in any positive or negative way? Are the interruptions necessary at that time? Do interruptions happen more at certain times or in certain places?

Asking friends and colleagues surely gave me some answers. Observing them while they worked was perhaps even better. A lot of their distractions were caused by external factors. I decided to focus on those and I came to the following point of view:

The more you plan interruptions, the less interruptive they become.

Interruptions in work are needed, but they all vary in importance and urgency. My goal is to find a way to determine the importance and urgency of interruptions and plan them (together with all other tasks) in a way that enables the highest productivity and the least stress.

After some extensive brainstorming I settled on the following idea:

Don’t-disturb time

An application with which workers update their status or state and let others be notified of this when they try to contact them. Examples of statuses could be: “do not disturb”, “available”, “on holiday”, “on a break”. The application has administrator-level options to overrule or set time limits for these statuses. An administrator could also have the option to see the statuses of all the employees on a dashboard. When this application is connected to the tools that the company uses, it will notify the people of these statuses when trying to call each other or try to send an email. It could even go as far as to use a piece of hardware on a desk that shows your status with colored lights, like a traffic light. Updating your status can be done via the app directly, but also by linking it to an agenda so that the status changes automatically based on the current task of the user.

I created a storyboard to lay out a possible scenario:

It was time to start prototyping. Using low-fidelity paper prototypes meant that I could very quickly alter it without wasting precious time and effort.

With these prototypes I managed to do heuristic evaluations. What are the problems that users run into? How severe are these issues and how could I solve them?
The goal of the app was clear, but the concept of planning a certain amount of time versus setting a time proved confusing. This was the issue that needed most attention besides other minor useability issues.

The next step was a digital wireframe.

Now that the app and its goals were clearly defined it was also time to plan out the next steps and realise the amount of work that is still left to do.

Design is dependent on functionality, therefore I kept the digital prototypes as simplistic as possible.

This was the time to make everything functional and test it on mobile devices with users. I made the prototypes completely functional within Adobe XD.

I asked people to perform the following tasks:

Start a timer immediately.
Set a new timer for a future time.
Contact someone through the app.
Allow people to email them during their don’t-disturb time.

If there were any useability issues, I expected to find them through these tasks.

This phase was very useful to find a lot more (minor) useability issues. Luckily these issues didn’t require a complete overhaul.
But I ran into a problem that required me to make a choice. Some users got confused with the amount of options on the start screen. On the other hand it is useful to have this info visible at a glance. This issue became apparent on the start screen where users could start a timer, or plan one for the future.

Is it better to have a lot of info available at once so that the user has to take a minimum amount of steps to reach their goal? Or is it better to minimize the info and put more info behind button presses to avoid information overload?

The best way to find out is by testing with an A/B test. Long story short: Minimizing the information overload is best.

Nothing stood in my way of finalizing the prototypes and starting to make it visually more appealing.

The result: https://xd.adobe.com/view/bb233ffe-293b-4177-8fad-0a1f3ba267d7-ee70/?fullscreen