660 Everywhere messaging

By “everywhere messaging ” we refer to the ability to send and receive electronic communication at any time and through a variety of means, including wired and wireless computer networks, voice telephones, and pagers. Our goal is to design messaging systems in which the receiver is always “on ” and available, and messages are correctly chosen for unintrusive delivery. But even in the office, and especially out of it, message arrival must compete in the real world with other activities that place demands on users ’ cognition and for which message alerting may itself be a distraction. In this paper we consider four experimental projects in terms of their ability to meet everywhere messaging requirements of minimizing interruption, adaptation to the user, location awareness, and unintrusive user interfaces. These projects demonstrate message filtering, location-specific delivery, flexible auditory alerting, and operation in, and monitoring of, a heterogenous networking environment. The last decade has seen e-mail become ubiquitous, following on the heels of voice mail from the previous decade. Wireless technology has become pervasive, at least in urban areas, both for text and voice communication. We have increasing means of being contacted and the pace of both personal and business communication is ever faster. Although the spread of wireless telephony clearly indicates a desire to communicate at any place and time, we complain of information overload, spam or junk mail, and continual interruptions from unwanted telephone calls. Some of us deliberately invoke strategies to minimize these interruptions, such as answering e-mail only once a day, but at a price of missing valuable communication and, in turn, spending mor