Hello again.

I'm in the process of designing and testing various ideas for an application whose main functionality will be to notify users of occurring events and offer them with a choice of actions for each.

The standard choice would be to create a queue of events showing a popup in the taskbar with the events and actions, but I want this tool to be the less intrusive and disrupting as possible.

What I'm after is a good book or papers on studies of how to maximize user productivity in these intrinsically disruptive scenarios (in other words, how to achieve the perfect degree of annoying-ness, not too much, not too little).

The user is supposedly interested in these events, they subscribe to them and can choose the actions to perform on each.

I prefer books and papers, but the usual StackOverflow wisdom is appreciated as well.

I'm after things like:

• Don't use popups, use instead X
• Show popups at most 3 seconds
• Show them in the left corner
• Use color X because it improves readability and disrupts less

That is, cognitive aspects of GUI design that would help users in such a scenario.