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.
Notifications & Stress In addition to negative effects on work efficiency, interruptions can also affect people emotionally. Interruptions in the workplace have been linked to frustration @cite_40 and stress @cite_38 . In the context of notifications, information workers felt significantly less stressed without email @cite_33 , without email notifications @cite_27 , or when checking work email was restricted to 3 times per day @cite_13 . However, work emails no longer reach us at only work. Our mobile devices may notify us about incoming emails at any time, which blurs the boundaries between work and private life @cite_6 @cite_16 . Stress levels were found to positively correlate with the number of mobile phone notifications from, in particular, email clients @cite_19 , which indicates that email notifications are particularly problematic. Mobile phone notifications in general have been linked to inattention and hyperactivity @cite_4 . On the basis of this related work, we hypothesize that the absence of notifications will reduce stress and other negative emotions.
@cite_38 @cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_6 @cite_19 @cite_40 @cite_27 @cite_16 @cite_13
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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. Notifications are the mechanism that mobile applications utilize to let users know that a new message, email, call or similar has been received. Notifications may make a sound, a vibration or modify the app icon in some way. They may make us stop what we are doing, thus interrupting us and having a negative effect on our work. Before defining a cause-effect relation between notifications and their impact on the users' current tasks, first we have to study how users manage notifications. This paper describes the results of a survey on how users react when they receive a notification. The results of this descriptive research show how people are moving from sound to visual notifications, which reflects the ability of people to adapt to new technologies. Desktop notifications are designed to provide awareness of information while a user is attending to a primary task. Unfortunately the awareness can come with the price of disruption to the focal task. We review results of a field study on the use and perceived value of email notifications in the workplace. We recorded users' interactions with software applications for two weeks and studied how notifications or their forced absence influenced users' quest for awareness of new email arrival, as well as the impact of notifications on their overall task focus. Results showed that users view notifications as a mechanism to provide passive awareness rather than a trigger to switch tasks. Turing off notifications cause some users to self interrupt more to explicitly monitor email arrival, while others appear to be able to better focus on their tasks. Users acknowledge notifications as disruptive, yet opt for them because of their perceived value in providing awareness. Limiting the frequency of checking email throughout the day reduced daily stress.Lower daily stress predicts greater well-being (e.g., higher positive affect).The frequency of checking email did not directly impact other well-being outcomes. Using email is one of the most common online activities in the world today. Yet, very little experimental research has examined the effect of email on well-being. Utilizing a within-subjects design, we investigated how the frequency of checking email affects well-being over a period of two weeks. During one week, 124 adults were randomly assigned to limit checking their email to three times a day; during the other week, participants could check their email an unlimited number of times per day. We found that during the limited email use week, participants experienced significantly lower daily stress than during the unlimited email use week. Lower stress, in turn, predicted higher well-being on a diverse range of well-being outcomes. These findings highlight the benefits of checking email less frequently for reducing psychological stress. As smartphones increasingly pervade our daily lives, people are ever more interrupted by alerts and notifications. Using both correlational and experimental methods, we explored whether such interruptions might be causing inattention and hyperactivity-symptoms associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) even in people not clinically diagnosed with ADHD. We recruited a sample of 221 participants from the general population. For one week, participants were assigned to maximize phone interruptions by keeping notification alerts on and their phones within their reach sight. During another week, participants were assigned to minimize phone interruptions by keeping alerts off and their phones away. Participants reported higher levels of inattention and hyperactivity when alerts were on than when alerts were off. Higher levels of inattention in turn predicted lower productivity and psychological well-being. These findings highlight some of the costs of ubiquitous connectivity and suggest how people can reduce these costs simply by adjusting existing phone settings. We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email. Interview data were consistent with our quantitative measures, as participants reported being able to focus more on their tasks. We discuss the implications for managing email better in organizations. Technology not only brings benefits such as flexible working practices but can also have negative stressful consequences such as increasing email overload and the blurring of work-home boundaries. We report on an exploratory study that extends the current understanding of email usage by investigating how different professions at a university manage work and personal emails using different devices and how this impacts their work-home boundary management. Our findings lead us to identify two user groups: those with permeable boundaries (primarily academics) and those who have more rigid ones (primarily professional services employees) and that there are differences in when, where and how they manage their work and personal emails. In particular we find that some participants use micro-boundary strategies to manage transitions between work and personal life. Based on these novel findings we propose improvements of email software design to facilitate effective email, work-home boundary management, and support micro-boundary practices. 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. Almost every office worker can relate to feelings of email overload and stress, but in reality the concept of email strain is not well understood. In this paper, we describe a large-scale nationwide organizational survey examining the relationship between email use and feelings of email overload and task coordination. We found that higher email volume was associated with increased feelings of email overload, but this relationship was moderated by certain email management strategies. The contribution to the field of CSCW is a better understanding of the concept of email related stress, and initial scale development for the assessment of email-related overload and perceptions of the work-importance of email. 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. Security researchers can send vulnerability notifications to take proactive measures in securing systems at scale. However, the factors affecting a notification’s efficacy have not been deeply explored. In this paper, we report on an extensive study of notifying thousands of parties of security issues present within their networks, with an aim of illuminating which fundamental aspects of notifications have the greatest impact on efficacy. The vulnerabilities used to drive our study span a range of protocols and considerations: exposure of industrial control systems; apparent firewall omissions for IPv6-based services; and exploitation of local systems in DDoS amplification attacks. We monitored vulnerable systems for several weeks to determine their rate of remediation. By comparing with experimental controls, we analyze the impact of a number of variables: choice of party to contact (WHOIS abuse contacts versus national CERTs versus US-CERT), message verbosity, hosting an information website linked to in the message, and translating the message into the notified party’s local language. We also assess the outcome of the emailing process itself (bounces, automated replies, human replies, silence) and characterize the sentiments and perspectives expressed in both the human replies and an optional anonymous survey that accompanied our notifications. We find that various notification regimens do result in different outcomes. The best observed process was directly notifying WHOIS contacts with detailed information in the message itself. These notifications had a statistically significant impact on improving remediation, and human replies were largely positive. However, the majority of notified contacts did not take action, and even when they did, remediation was often only partial. Repeat notifications did not further patching. These results are promising but ultimately modest, behooving the security community to more deeply investigate ways to improve the effectiveness of vulnerability notifications. Smartphones have become an indispensable part of everyday life. By this time, push notifications are at the core of many apps, proactively pushing new content to users. These notifications may raise awareness, but also have the downside of being disruptive. In this paper we present a laboratory study investigating users' attitudes towards notifications and how they deal with notification settings on their smartphones. Permission requests for sending push notifications on iOS don't inform the user about the nature of notifications of this app, leaving the user to make a rather uninformed choice on whether to accept or deny. We show that requests including explanations are significantly more likely to be accepted. Our results further indicate that apart from being disruptive, notifications may create stress due to information overload. Notification settings, once assigned a preset, are rarely changed, although not necessarily matching the favored one. Human multitasking is often the result of self-initiated interruptions in the performance of an ongoing task. These self-interruptions occur in the absence of external triggers such as electronic alerts or email notifications. Compared to externally induced interruptions, self-interruptions have not received enough research attention. To address this gap, this paper develops a typology of self-interruptions based on the integration of Flow Theory and Self-regulation Theory. In this new typology, the two major categories stem from positive and negative feelings of task progress and prospects of goal attainment. The proposed classification is validated in an experimental multitasking environment with pre-defined tasks. Empirical findings indicate that negative feelings trigger more self-interruptions than positive feelings. In general, more self-interruptions result in lower accuracy in all tasks. The results suggest that negative internal triggers of self-interruptions unleash a downward spiral that may degrade performance. In a document network such as a citation network of scientific documents, web-logs, etc., the content produced by authors exhibits their interest in certain topics. In addition some authors influence other authors' interests. In this work, we propose to model the influence of cited authors along with the interests of citing authors. Moreover, we hypothesize that apart from the citations present in documents, the context surrounding the citation mention provides extra topical information about the cited authors. However, associating terms in the context to the cited authors remains an open problem. We propose novel document generation schemes that incorporate the context while simultaneously modeling the interests of citing authors and influence of the cited authors. Our experiments show significant improvements over baseline models for various evaluation criteria such as link prediction between document and cited author, and quantitatively explaining unseen text. It is well documented that interacting with a mobile phone is associated with poorer performance on concurrently performed tasks because limited attentional resources must be shared between tasks. However, mobile phones generate auditory or tactile notifications to alert users of incoming calls and messages. Although these notifications are generally short in duration, they can prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind wandering, which has been shown to damage task performance. We found that cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants did not directly interact with a mobile device during the task. The magnitude of observed distraction effects was comparable in magnitude to those seen when users actively used a mobile phone, either for voice calls or text messaging. (PsycINFO Database Record Keywords: Driver distraction; Language: en A notification represents the proactive delivery of information to a user and reduces the need to visually scan or repeatedly check an external information source. At the same time, notifications often interrupt user tasks at inopportune moments, decreasing productivity and increasing frustration. Controlled studies have shown that linking notification delivery to the perceptual structure of a user's tasks can reduce these interruption costs. However, in these studies, the scheduling was always performed manually, and it was not clear whether it would be possible for a system to mimic similar techniques. This article contributes the design and implementation of a novel system called Oasis that aligns notification scheduling with the perceptual structure of user tasks. We describe the architecture of the system, how it detects task structure on the fly without explicit knowledge of the task itself, and how it layers flexible notification scheduling policies on top of this detection mechanism. The system also includes an offline tool for creating customized statistical models for detecting task structure. The value of our system is that it intelligently schedules notifications, enabling the reductions in interruption costs shown within prior controlled studies to now be realized by users in everyday desktop computing tasks. It also provides a test bed for experimenting with how notification management policies and other system functionalities can be linked to task structure. An overwhelming number of news articles are available every day via the internet. Unfortunately, it is impossible for us to peruse more than a handful; furthermore it is difficult to ascertain an article’s social context, i.e., is it popular, what sorts of people are reading it, etc. In this paper, we develop a system to address this problem in the restricted domain of political news by harnessing implicit and explicit contextual information from the blogosphere. Specifically, we track thousands of blogs and the news articles they cite, collapsing news articles that have highly overlapping content. We then tag each article with the number of blogs citing it, the political orientation of those blogs, and the level of emotional charge expressed in the blog posts that link to the news article. We summarize and present the results to the user via a novel visualization which displays this contextual information; the user can then find the most popular articles, the articles most cited by liberals, the articles most emotionally discussed in the political blogosphere, etc. We describe a study on the influence of instant messaging (IM) on ongoing computing tasks. The study both replicates and extends earlier work on the cost of sending notifications at different times and the sensitivity of different tasks to interruption. We investigate alternative hypotheses about the nature of disruption for a list evaluation task, an activity identified as being particularly costly to interrupt. Our findings once again show the generally disruptive effects of IM, especially during fast, stimulus-driven search tasks. In addition, we show that interruptions coming early during a search task are more likely to result in the user forgetting the primary task goal than interruptions that arrive later on. These findings have implications for the design of user interfaces and notification policies that minimize the disruptiveness of notifications. The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times finds a strong link between positive affect and virality, and, based on psychological theories it is concluded that this relation is universally valid. The conclusion appears to be in contrast with classic theory of diffusion in news media emphasizing negative affect as promoting propagation. In this paper we explore the apparent paradox in a quantitative analysis of information diffusion on Twitter. Twitter is interesting in this context as it has been shown to present both the characteristics social and news media. The basic measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet. Twitter is different from email in that retweeting does not depend on pre-existing social relations, but often occur among strangers, thus in this respect Twitter may be more similar to traditional news media. We therefore hypothesize that negative news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. We conclude that the relation between affect and virality is more complex than expected based on the findings of Berger and Milkman (2010), in short 'if you want to be cited: Sweet talk your friends or serve bad news to the public'. 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.