We report from the Do Not Disturb Challenge where 30 volunteers disabled notification alerts for 24 hours across all devices. The effect of the absence of notifications on the participants was isolated through an experimental study design: we compared self-reported feedback from the day without notifications against a baseline day. The evidence indicates that notifications have locked us in a dilemma: without notifications, participants felt less distracted and more productive. But, they also felt no longer able to be as responsive as expected, which made some participants anxious. And, they felt less connected with one's social group. In contrast to previous reports, about two third of the participants expressed the intention to change how they manage notifications. Two years later, half of the participants are still following through with their plans.
Notification-Management Strategies In a recent survey @cite_35 , the majority of respondents considered themselves to typically receive 20-50 or 50-100 notifications per day. In an log study on mobile phone notifications @cite_19 , participants received a medium number of 63.5 of notifications per day. Both results reveal that, on average, people deal with dozens of notification alerts every day. To manage this volume of notifications, Chang and Tang @cite_28 found that the ringer mode is a frequently-used mechanism to manage attentiveness to notifications on mobile phones. Lopez-Tovar @cite_22 argue that users desire more fine-grained control over how notifications are presented in different contexts. However, Westermann @cite_2 report that only a small fraction (10 , people typically remain exposed to the majority of the notifications alerts that they receive.
@cite_35 @cite_22 @cite_28 @cite_19 @cite_2
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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. We report from 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. We found that our participants had to deal with 63.5 notifications on average per day, mostly from messengers and email. Whether the phone is in silent mode or not, notifications were typically viewed within minutes. Social pressure in personal communication was amongst the main reasons given. While an increasing number of notifications was associated with an increase in negative emotions, receiving more messages and social network updates also made our participants feel more connected with others. Our findings imply that avoiding interruptions from notifications may be viable for professional communication, while in personal communication, approaches should focus on managing expectations. Social norm has it that people are expected to respond to mobile phone messages quickly. We investigate how attentive people really are and how timely they actually check and triage new messages throughout the day. By collecting more than 55,000 messages from 42 mobile phone users over the course of two weeks, we were able to predict people's attentiveness through their mobile phone usage with close to 80 accuracy. We found that people were attentive to messages 12.1 hours a day, i.e. 84.8 hours per week, and provide statistical evidence how very short people's inattentiveness lasts: in 75 of the cases mobile phone users return to their attentive state within 5 minutes. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of attentiveness throughout each hour of the day and show that intelligent notification delivery services, such as bounded deferral, can assume that inattentiveness will be rare and subside quickly. Notifications are a core feature of mobile phones. They inform users about a variety of events. Users may take immediate action or ignore them depending on the importance of a notification as well as their current context. The nature of notifications is manifold, applications use them both sparsely and frequently. In this paper we present the first large-scale analysis of mobile notifications with a focus on users' subjective perceptions. We derive a holistic picture of notifications on mobile phones by collecting close to 200 million notifications from more than 40,000 users. Using a data-driven approach, we break down what users like and dislike about notifications. Our results reveal differences in importance of notifications and how users value notifications from messaging apps as well as notifications that include information about people and events. Based on these results we derive a number of findings about the nature of notifications and guidelines to effectively use them. Smartphones are considered to be "always on, always connected" but mobile users are not always attentive and responsive to incoming communication. We present a mixed methods study investigating how mobile users use ringer modes for managing interruption by and awareness of incoming communication, and how these practices and locales affect their attentiveness and responsiveness. We show that mobile users have diverse ringer mode usage, but they switch ringer modes mainly for three purposes: avoiding interruption, preventing the phone from disrupting the environment, and noticing important notifications. In addition, without signals of notifications, users are less likely to immediately attend to notifications, but they are not less responsive to those they have attended. Finally, ringer mode switches, attentiveness, and responsiveness are all correlated with certain locales. We discuss implications from these findings, and suggest how future CMC tools and notification services take different purposes for using ringer modes and locales into consideration.