The Myth of Subtle Notifications : Understanding How and Why People Attend to Mobile Notifications

Many smart phone applications use the notifications services to keep user informed and engaged with the events around the applications. However not all the notifications are of the same importance level to the user. We explore how mobile notifications are regarded and desired as increasing number of mobile applications are adopting notification services. We logged notification management traces from 10 individuals for 15 days to understand how they regarded mobile notifi- cations, and whether different modality (e.g., sound, vibra- tion, light), time and application context influence their at- tending characteristics. Then we conducted semi-structured interviews in which participants explained their notification attendance behaviour. Our findings suggest that users would like to have more fine grained control over mobile notification management beyond current opt-in/opt-out practice, prefer to schedule a subset of notifications to be delivered at prede- fined times, and desire more subtle and persistent notification modalities such as multi-colour ambient lights.