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.
Suppressing Notifications Two previous studies applied the methodology of depriving participants from notifications: Iqbal and Horvitz @cite_27 asked 20 information workers to turn off email notifications on their work computers for one week. Compared to a baseline week, some participants checked emails more frequently as a result, but for the majority of the participants, it reduced the frequency of opportunistic email checking. While the participants were aware that notifications are disruptive, they valued the awareness they provide. After the study, none of the participants kept notifications disabled.
@cite_27
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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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. We present a novel system for notification management and report results from two studies testing its performance and impact. The system uses statistical models to realize defer-to-breakpoint policies for managing notifications. The first study tested how well the models detect three types of breakpoints within novel task sequences. Results show that the models detect breakpoints reasonably well, but struggle to differentiate their type. Our second study explored effects of managing notifications with our system on users and their tasks. Results showed that scheduling notifications at breakpoints reduces frustration and reaction time relative to delivering them immediately. We also found that the relevance of notification content determines the type of breakpoint at which it should be delivered. The core concept of scheduling notifications at breakpoints fits well with how users prefer notifications to be managed. This indicates that users would likely adopt the use of notification management systems in practice. The components of a loosely coupled system are typically designed to operate by generating and responding to asynchronous events. An event notification service is an application-independent infrastructure that supports the construction of event-based systems, whereby generators of events publish event notifications to the infrastructure and consumers of events subscribe with the infrastructure to receive relevant notifications. The two primary services that should be provided to components by the infrastructure are notification selection (i.e., determining which notifications match which subscriptions) and notification delivery (i.e., routing matching notifications from publishers to subscribers). Numerous event notification services have been developed for local-area networks, generally based on a centralized server to select and deliver event notifications. Therefore, they suffer from an inherent inability to scale to wide-area networks, such as the Internet, where the number and physical distribution of the service’s clients can quickly overwhelm a centralized solution. The critical challenge in the setting of a wide-area network is to maximize the expressiveness in the selection mechanism without sacrificing scalability in the delivery mechanism. This paper presents SIENA, an event notification service that we have designed and implemented to exhibit both expressiveness and scalability. We describe the service’s interface to applications, the algorithms used by networks of servers to select and deliver event notifications, and the strategies used Smartphones are capable of alerting their users to different kinds of digital interruption using different modalities and with varying modulation. Smart notification is the capability of a smartphone for selecting the user's preferred kind of alert in particular situations using the full vocabulary of notification modalities and modulations. It therefore goes well beyond attempts to predict if or when to silence a ringing phone call. We demonstrate smart notification for messages received from a document retrieval system while the user is attending a meeting. The notification manager learns about their notification preferences from users' judgements about videos of meetings. It takes account of the relevance of the interruption to the meeting, whether the user is busy and the sensed location of the smartphone. Through repeated training, the notification manager learns to reliably predict the preferred notification modes for users and this learning continues to improve with use. We focus on email-based attacks, a rich field with well-publicized consequences. We show how current Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology allows an attacker to generate masquerade attacks on scale, and study their effectiveness with a within-subjects study. We also gather insights on what parts of an email do users focus on and how users identify attacks in this realm, by planting signals and also by asking them for their reasoning. We find that: (i) 17 of participants could not identify any of the signals that were inserted in emails, and (ii) Participants were unable to perform better than random guessing on these attacks. The insights gathered and the tools and techniques employed could help defenders in: (i) implementing new, customized anti-phishing solutions for Internet users including training next-generation email filters that go beyond vanilla spam filters and capable of addressing masquerade, (ii) more effectively training and upgrading the skills of email users, and (iii) understanding the dynamics of this novel attack and its ability of tricking humans. This article explores the operation of warrants, connections between online and real-world identities, on deceptive behavior in computer-mediated communication. A survey of 132 participants assessed three types of warrants (the use of a real name, a photo, and the presence of real-world acquaintances) in five different media: IM, Forums, Chat, Social Networking Sites (SNS) and Email. The effect of warrants on lies about demographic information (e.g., age, gender, education, etc.), one's interests (e.g., religion, music preferences, etc.), and the seriousness of lies was assessed. Overall, deception was observed most frequently in Chat and least often in SNS and Email. The relationship between warrants and deception was negative and linear, with warrants suppressing the frequency and seriousness of deception regardless of medium, although real-world acquaintances were especially powerful in constraining deception in SNS and emails. The aim of this research was to understand what affects people's privacy preferences in smartphone apps. We ran a four-week study in the wild with 34 participants. Participants were asked to answer questions, which were used to gather their personal context and to measure their privacy preferences by varying app name and purpose of data collection. Our results show that participants shared the most when no information about data access or purpose was given, and shared the least when both of these details were specified. When just one of either purpose or the requesting app was shown, participants shared less when just the purpose was specified than when just the app name was given. We found that the purpose for data access was the predominant factor affecting users' choices. In our study the purpose condition vary from being not specified, to vague to be very specific. Participants were more willing to disclose data when no purpose was specified. When a vague purpose was shown, participants became more privacy-aware and were less willing to disclose their information. When specific purposes were shown participants were more willing to disclose when the purpose for requesting the information appeared to be beneficial to them, and shared the least when the purpose for data access was solely beneficial to developers. In to days economy, collaborative computing grows in importance. Inter-organizational service-based processes are increasingly adopted by different companies when they cannot achieve goals on their own. As a result, conformance problems arise and it must be ensured that the integrity of processes execution remains guaranteed. In this paper, we propose new components, to be deployed along the boundaries of each participating organization, offering external flow control, and notification in case of violation detection, while providing process execution traceability. To achieve our goals, we propose an event-based approach in which inter-organizational exchanges are perceived as events. We define event patterns for filtering the desirable incoming and outgoing messages.