Notifications on mobile phones alert users about new messages, emails, social network updates, and other events. However, little is understood about the nature and effect of such notifications on the daily lives of mobile users. Hence, we conducted a one-week, in-situ study involving 15 mobile phones users, where we collected real-world notifications through a smartphone logging application alongside subjective perceptions of those notifications through an online diary.
In summary, we found that mobile phone users have to deal with a large volume of notifications, mostly from messengers and email, each day (63.5 on average per day), which was perceived as the usual. Notifications were largely checked within a few minutes of arrival, regardless of whether the phone was in silent mode or not. Notifications from messengers and social networks were checked fastest.
In particular in the case of personal communication, explanations for these fast reaction times related to high social expectations and the exchange of time-critical information.
Increasing numbers of notifications, in particular from email and social networks, correlated with negative emotions, such as stress and feeling overwhelmed. Personal communication, on the other hand, also related to increased feelings of being connected with others.
These findings highlight that strategies are needed to lower negative emotions. Reviewing previously explored approaches, our findings imply that reducing interruptions and deferring notifications may work in a professional context. For a personal context, strategies around communicating (un)availability and managing expectations appear more suited.
This research is described in detailed in the paper An In-Situ Study of Mobile Phone Notifications, which will be presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, held in Toronto, Canada in September 2014.
