Impact of high-intensity negotiated-style interruptions on end-user debugging

Extending our previous work [T. Robertson, S. Prabhakararao, M. Burnett, C. Cook, J. Ruthruff, L. Beckwith, A. Phalgune, Impact of interruption style on end-user debugging, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2004)], we delve deeper into the question of which interruption style best supports end-user debugging. Previously, we found no advantages of immediate-style interruptions (which force the user to divert attention to the interruption at hand) over negotiated-style interruptions (which notify users without actually preventing them from working) in supporting end-user debugging. In this study, we altered our negotiated-style interruptions [A. Wilson, M. Burnett, L. Beckwith, O. Granatir, L. Casburn, C. Cook, M. Durham, G. Rothermel, Harnessing curiosity to increase correctness in end-user programming, Proceedings of the CHI 2003 (2003), 305–312] (which were shown to help end-user debuggers learn about and use debugging features of our programming language) such that they were more intense (larger, blinking, and/or accompanied by text).