Abhinav Mehrotra
Veljko Pejovic
Jo Vermeulen
Mirco Musolesi
ABSTRACT
Notifications are extremely beneficial to users, but they often demand their attention at inappropriate moments. In this paper we present an in-situ study of mobile interruptibility focusing on the effect of cognitive and physical factors on the response time and the disruption perceived from a notification. Through a mixed method of automated smartphone logging and experience sampling we collected 10372 in-the-wild notifications and 474 questionnaire responses on notification perception from 20 users. We found that the response time and the perceived disruption from a notification can be influenced by its presentation, alert type, sender-recipient relationship as well as the type, completion level and complexity of the task in which the user is engaged. We found that even a notification that contains important or useful content can cause disruption. Finally, we observe the substantial role of the psychological traits of the individuals on the response time and the disruption perceived from a notification.
- Android's Notification Listener Service. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/service/notification/NotificationListenerService.html.Google Scholar
- Android's Speech Recognizer API. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/SpeechRecognizer.html.Google Scholar
- Google's Activity Recognition API. http://developer.android.com/training/location/activity-recognition.html.Google Scholar
- Heads-up Notifications. http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications.html#Heads-up.Google Scholar
- Piotr D Adamczyk and Brian P Bailey. 2004. If not now, when?: the effects of interruption at different moments within task execution. In CHI'04. ACM, Vienna, Austria, 271--278. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Erik M Altmann and J Gregory Trafton. 2002. Memory for goals: An activation-based model. Cognitive science 26, 1 (2002), 39--83.Google Scholar
- Brian P Bailey and Joseph A Konstan. 2006. On the need for attention-aware systems: Measuring effects of interruption on task performance, error rate, and affective state. Computers in Human Behavior 22, 4 (2006), 685--708.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Brian P Bailey, Joseph A Konstan, and John V Carlis. 2000. Measuring the effects of interruptions on task performance in the user interface. In SMC'00, Vol. 2. IEEE, Nashville,TN, USA, 757--762.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jelmer P Borst, Niels A Taatgen, and Hedderik van Rijn. 2010. The problem state: a cognitive bottleneck in multitasking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, memory, and cognition 36, 2 (2010), 363.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Herbert H Clark. 1996. Using language. Vol. 1996. Cambridge University Press Cambridge.Google Scholar
- Edward Cutrell, Mary Czerwinski, and Eric Horvitz. 2001. Notification, disruption, and memory: Effects of messaging interruptions on memory and performance. In Interact'01. IOS Press, Tokyo, Japan, 263--270.Google Scholar
- Mary Czerwinski, Edward Cutrell, and Eric Horvitz. 2000a. Instant messaging and interruption: Influence of task type on performance. In OZCHI'00. ACM, Sydney, Australia, 361--367.Google Scholar
- Mary Czerwinski, Edward Cutrell, and Eric Horvitz. 2000b. Instant messaging: Effects of relevance and timing. People and computers XIV: Proceedings of HCI 2 (2000), 71--76.Google Scholar
- Joel E Fischer, Chris Greenhalgh, and Steve Benford. 2011. Investigating episodes of mobile phone activity as indicators of opportune moments to deliver notifications. In MobileHCI'11. ACM, Stockholm, Sweden, 181--190. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Joel E Fischer, Nick Yee, Victoria Bellotti, Nathan Good, Steve Benford, and Chris Greenhalgh. 2010. Effects of Content and Time of Delivery on Receptivity to Mobile Interruptions. In MobileHCI'10. ACM, Lisbon, Portugal, 103--112. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lewis R Goldberg. 1992. The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment 4, 1 (1992), 26.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Victor M. Gonzalez and Mark. Gloria. 2004. Constant, Constant, Multi-Tasking Craziness: Managing Multiple Working Spheres. In CHI'04. ACM, Vienna, Austria, 113--120. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Joyce Ho and Stephen S. Intille. 2005. Using Context-Aware Computing to Reduce the Perceived Burden of Interruptions from Mobile Devices. In CHI'05. ACM, Seoul, Korea, 909--918. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eric Horvitz and Johnson Apacible. 2003. Learning and Reasoning about Interruption. In ICMI'03. ACM, Vancouver, Canada, 20--27. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shamsi T Iqbal and Eric Horvitz. 2010. Notifications and awareness: a field study of alert usage and preferences. In CSCW'10. ACM, Savannah, Georgia, USA, 27--30. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shamsi T Iqbal, Xianjun Sam Zheng, and Brian P Bailey. 2004. Task-evoked pupillary response to mental workload in human-computer interaction. In CHI'04 Extended Abstracts. ACM, Vienna, Austria, 1477--1480. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Neal Lathia, Kiran K. Rachuri, Cecilia Mascolo, and George Roussos. 2013. Open Source Smartphone Libraries for Computational Social Science. In MCSS'13. ACM, Zurich, Switzerland, 911--920. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Abhinav Mehrotra, Mirco Musolesi, Robert Hendley, and Veljko Pejovic. 2015. Designing Content-driven Intelligent Notification Mechanisms for Mobile Applications. In UbiComp'15. ACM, Osaka, Japan, 813--824. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yoshiro Miyata and Donald A. Norman. 1986. Psychological Issues in Support of Multiple Activities. User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction (1986), 265--284.Google Scholar
- Christopher A Monk, Deborah A Boehm-Davis, and J Gregory Trafton. 2002. The attentional costs of interrupting task performance at various stages. In HFES'02, Vol. 46. SAGE Publications, Baltimore, MD, 1824--1828.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Antti Oulasvirta, Tye Rattenbury, Lingyi Ma, and Eeva Raita. 2012. Habits make smartphone use more pervasive. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 16, 1 (2012), 105--114. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Veljko Pejovic, Abhinav Mehrotra, and Mirco Musolesi. 2015. Investigating The Role of Task Engagement in Mobile Interruptibility. In MobileHCI'15 Adjunct. ACM, Copenhagen, Denmark. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Veljko Pejovic and Mirco Musolesi. 2014. InterruptMe: designing intelligent prompting mechanisms for pervasive applications. In UbiComp'14. ACM, Seattle, WA, USA, 897--908. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Martin Pielot, Karen Church, and Rodrigo de Oliveira. 2014a. An in-situ study of mobile phone notifications. In MobileHCI'14. ACM, Toronto, ON, Canada, 233--242. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Martin Pielot, Rodrigo de Oliveira, Haewoon Kwak, and Nuria Oliver. 2014b. Didn't you see my message?: predicting attentiveness to mobile instant messages. In CHI'14. ACM, Toronto, ON, Canada, 3319--3328. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Martin Pielot, Tilman Dingler, Jose San Pedro, and Nuria Oliver. 2015. When attention is not scarce-detecting boredom from mobile phone usage. In UbiComp'15. ACM, Osaka, Japan, 825--836. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Niels Henze, Tilman Dingler, Martin Pielot, Dominik Weber, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2014. Large-scale assessment of mobile notifications. In CHI'14. ACM, Toronto, ON, Canada, 3055--3064. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum, and Courtney Yehnert. 2015. The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 41, 4 (2015), 893.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- My Phone and Me: Understanding People's Receptivity to Mobile Notifications
Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.
Recommendations
An in-situ study of mobile phone notifications
MobileHCI '14: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices & servicesNotifications 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-...
Large-scale assessment of mobile notifications
CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsNotifications 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 ...
"Silence Your Phones": Smartphone Notifications Increase Inattention and Hyperactivity Symptoms
CHI '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsAs 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-...
Comments