An in-situ study of mobile phone notifications

Abstract

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.

Working 9-5?

“…The fact that only professional services staff restricted their email to personal accounts on their phones suggests that smartphones are considered differently between the two professional groups. In addition, confirming our finding that smartphones intrude even in the most private of moments, Pielot et al [26] found that the number of emails received on smartphones is correlated with stress from receiving work emails after work. Moreover, we are able to confirm that Matthews et al's [20] findings are still valid after five years where people generally still use their phones to triage their email, and computers respond to messages, despite the fact that mobile behaviours are said to have changed over the course of that time [9].…”

Energy Efficient Scheduling for Mobile Push Notifications

“…However, as seen from Figure 4, some users receive as many as 200 notifications on some days and only a few on other days. This trend corresponds in size and distribution to those push notifications collected by Pielot et al [15] and also those observed …”

“…These messages have become so popular that users now receive hundreds of push notifications per day, many of which are non critical and does not require immediate attention (excluding SMS, and messages from other real time communication services, e.g., Skype, WhatsApp, etc.) [13,15]. While the impact of this increase has been studied in terms of its disruptive aspects on the end users, little attention has been given to the push notification delivery services from a system perspective and their impact on energy consumption on the mobile device.…”

What Is Being Used and Who Is Using It: Barriers to the Adoption of Smartphone Patient Experience Surveys (Preprint)

“…With mobile devices, researchers are able to collect large quantities of data over broad geographical areas. Further, the use of smartphone-based applications ('apps') provides access to functionality such as location-based activity detection [13,14] and notifications [15] that can help improve survey compliance and data completeness of survey responses. These features can help overcome known limitations of paper surveys, such as recall bias and transcription error, to improve overall reliability of results [16].…”