User Perception of Interruptions in Multimedia Annotation Tasks.

For mixed-initiative multimedia annotation systems an effective dialogue between the system and user is critical. In order to inform the development of such dialogue a clear insight into the impact of interruptions upon the perceptions of the user is required. We present preliminary results of an investigation into interruptions in the form of queries to the user. We show that a user can perceive differences between trivial and important queries. Whether a query is shown in or out of context, or at some opportune time, is also shown to have an impact on user perception of the system.