Customer Profile & Value Proposition Map

Persona I – The Deep Worker

A knowledge worker or student who needs extended periods of uninterrupted focus to do their best work. They are productive in flow states but regularly pulled out of them by notifications, messages, and contextual switches. They need a system that protects their attention without requiring constant manual management.

Persona II – The Overloaded Student

A university student juggling coursework, communication apps, and social media across the same device. They struggle to distinguish between urgent and non-urgent signals, and often spend more time managing notifications than doing the actual work. They need a system that reduces the noise without them having to think about it.

Business Idea

What problem are you solving?

Digital interfaces are built to deliver information as fast as possible: but human attention does not work that way. Every interruption carries a cognitive recovery cost that current systems completely ignore. The result is a generation of users who are constantly reactive, chronically distracted, and unable to reach the deep focus states where their best thinking happens. There is no mainstream product that treats attention as a resource worth protecting at the system level.

Why should we care about it?

Attention is not just a productivity concern, it is a mental health issue. Sustained notification overload is linked to higher cortisol levels, reduced working memory performance, and increased anxiety. At the same time, the economic cost of fragmented attention in knowledge work is measurable: studies estimate billions in lost productive hours annually due to interruption-driven task switching. The problem affects every person who works or studies with a digital device which is effectively everyone.

What is the solution? How does it work?

An attention-aware notification layer that sits between the operating system and the user’s apps. It uses behavioral signals: typing rhythm, app dwell time, task duration, time of day, to infer whether the user is in a focused state. When focus is detected, non-urgent notifications are held and batched for delivery at a natural task boundary. When an interruption does occur, the system provides a resumption cue, a lightweight context snapshot that helps the user return to their previous task faster. No manual configuration required; the system learns the user’s patterns over time.

Who is the target audience / customer?

The primary users are knowledge workers and students: anyone whose productivity depends on sustained focus. The paying customers are organizations: companies that want to reduce burnout and increase deep work capacity among employees, educational institutions looking to support student focus, and productivity software companies that want to integrate attention-awareness into their existing tools as a premium feature.

What is going to happen? (Change & Impact)

We move from a model where every moment is equally interruptible to one where digital systems respect the rhythm of human cognition. Interruptions do not disappear, they are timed better. Users reclaim extended focus periods without having to fight their devices to do it. Over time, this reduces the normalization of fragmented attention and establishes a new expectation: that technology should protect focus, not just compete for it.

System Map

At the center is the Attention-Aware Interface System, a framework designed to make digital environments sensitive to a user’s attentional state before delivering interruptions, rather than eliminating them entirely. The inner ring holds the direct users: knowledge workers, students, remote workers, and multitaskers, each experiencing interruptions differently based on task type and cognitive load. Surrounding them are the groups that shape interruption conditions: app developers, OS providers, and notification senders and at the outer edge, the institutional forces of employers, researchers, hardware makers, and policy bodies. Together, these layers show that attention is not just a personal resource, it is a systemic one.

Change and Impact

This comparison highlights the shift from interruption-blind digital systems to attention-aware design. Current notification architectures are built around the sender’s intent, not the receiver’s cognitive state. A message is delivered the moment it is sent, regardless of whether the recipient is mid-task, in a flow state, or already cognitively overloaded. The result is a system optimized for immediacy at the cost of sustained focus.

Inclusion & Accessibility

Access to an attention-aware system is not uniform. The ability to benefit from interruption management depends on a range of cognitive, physical, and social factors that are unevenly distributed across users. Some barriers are internal: a person with ADHD may experience interruption recovery very differently from a neurotypical user: for them, even a brief disruption can cascade into a much longer loss of focus. Users in high-stress or high-anxiety states are more vulnerable to the compounding effects of notification overload. Inclusion here is about cognitive and emotional accessibility, not just physical or perceptual access.

New semester, new researches and new problems…Moving from theoretical research into lo-fi prototyping forced me to confront something I had been putting off: my topic is hard to make it physical. Research on attention, interruption and cognitive recovery does not translate naturally into a clickable mockup or a paper sketch. The phenomenon I am studying is internal and time-dependent. You cannot see it on a screen.

The approach I took was a simple behavioural task. A participant reads a short text and corrects errors in it while thinking aloud. I interrupt them once with a spoken question, then observe how they return to the task. To capture focus levels over time, I built a small browser tool; a slider the participant adjusts continuously, which logs their self-reported focus every thirty seconds and marks the exact moment of the interruption. At the end of the session it exports a CSV, so it is easier to track the data. It is low-tech, but it produces real data grounded directly in the literature.

The first test format was a speed dating exercise: five-minute exchanges rotating between participants. The idea is to get fast, varied feedback, and it works well for many types of prototypes. For mine, it was harder to make useful. Five minutes is not long enough for a person to actually get into the task before the interruption happens. Most of the time was spent explaining the setup rather than experiencing it, so the feedback reflected how clearly I could describe the concept more than how the prototype itself worked.

The most consistent piece of feedback was about the setup: having the task on one device and the focus slider on another felt fragmented. Several people pointed out that if I am studying attention, adding friction between two separate tools is counterproductive. It is a fair observation and one I plan to address, consolidating everything into a single interface makes more sense both practically and conceptually.

The session was useful in a different way than I expected. It did not tell me much about interruption and recovery, but it did clarify the limits of the current prototype as a communication tool. My research sits closer to the theoretical end of the spectrum for now, and that makes it genuinely difficult to prototype in a format that works for quick explanation to someone unfamiliar with the underlying psychology.

The plan is to run the full session individually, without the time pressure, in a setting where the participant can actually reach a state of focus before the interruption lands. I also want to think about whether a behavioural experiment alone is the right form, or whether the research needs a more designed artefact alongside it, something that makes the concept visible rather than just measurable.

New semester – new me. More or less, at least. While I was extremely confident about my chosen research topic last semester “Creating User-Centered Strategies that align with Business and IT Goals in an innovative Agile Environment. Use Case: Self Checkout Terminals in Supermarkets” the tables have turned.

Rewind – initial idea

Reason No. 1: I initially chose this topic because ever since my internship at Bosch last year I’ve realized how important it is to keep all three feasibility, viability and desirability in mind .

Reason No. 2: The specific use cases of Self Checkout terminals in supermarket seemed like a reasonable extension to the topic, since it aligns with my tasks at my student job. On top, my company would’ve be interested in a collaboration for the thesis.

Long story short: I have gotten to realize that theses matters are already researched through and through.

Motivation – Focusing on employees and/or consumer protection

Instead I would like to contribute something that’s actually innovative and has a social and ethical impact on top. Over the past few years topics such as protection of employees and consumer protection have been on my mind frequently.

Possible idea + 1st Prototype

About two years ago I had the opportunity to participate in an interdisciplinary project called Legal Design Sprint endorsed by the Chambor of Labour Vienna. The project of my team (topic “Mobility”) was even awarded by a team of experts.

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Topic Mobility – How do people commute to work?

Two thirds of Austrian employees commute to work by car. [1]

To guarantee a sustainable future this must change. There is a set of alternatives, such as riding the bike to work or using public transport. Nevertheless, these options are limited and raise a few pain points:

• How much responsibility should be carried upon employers?
• Which obstacles are people on the countryside facing?
• How do we convince car drivers to let go of their habits?
• Are possible alternatives tangible?

Our Solution

With our concept “Business Mobility Strategy” employers must be made responsible for the possibilities of commute that are being offered to their employees. To do this a dialog between both sides – employers and employees – needs to happen.

1. Interface: The service will be implemented in the “USP – Unternehmensserviceportal” (= the major online service for Austrian businesses).
2. Data collection: Employers must enter data such as the distance to the nearest bus station or the amount of parking space available for employees.
3. Less Red Tape: Business owners are constantly exposed to endless and redundant paperwork. Usability Tests will assure a seamless and viable end-to-end experience.
4. Data Evaluation: Once all the information is submitted the businesses approach and actions towards sustainability in mobility will be graded. This assessment scheme will be defined by experts to guarantee transparency.
5. Recommended Actions: The evaluation also provides businesses with an answer on how to improve in the topic of sustainable mobility.‍ Employers can set these recommendations as goals to improve rating and help their employees with commuting to work.
6. Spot Checks: An independent institution will make sure the businesses have submitted their mobility data correctly.

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Alternative options:

• dark patterns in fast fashion e-commerce (e.g. SHEIN)
• user centered interaction of the “Arbeitnehmer:innenveranlagung”

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Reference

[1] G. Kovacic, Cristian Andronic, and S. Kirchmayr-Novak, ÖV-Erreichbarkeit großer Arbeitsplatzstandorte in Österreich. 2022.

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