Conversational Partner’s Perception of Subtle Display Use for Monitoring Notifications

We examine whether the gaze direction of a user reveals the use of a subtle display during a face-to-face conversation with a partner who is not initially aware of the display. We measure twelve participants’ perceptions of a casual conversational partner’s engagement between a control condition of no notification and notifications displayed behind the participant’s head at 0, 10, and 20 degrees to the right of the conversational partner’s line of sight. No differences in reported conversational engagement were found. However, once the presence of the display was revealed, engagement scores went down over all conditions compared to the prior uninformed variant of the experiment. Still, no difference was found between the control and the subtle display conditions, and informed participants were only 40% accurate on average in detecting the use of the display. In a second study comparing subtle display user engagement with smartwatch user engagement, six participants rated a conversational partner more distracted when the partner used a smartwatch to monitor notifications than when the partner used a display secretly mounted behind the participant’s head. Participants in both studies did not realize the presence of the display until it was revealed. These results suggest that eye movement when using a subtle display detracts less from the conversational experience than the use of a smartwatch.