skip to main content
10.1145/2556288.2557189acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Large-scale assessment of mobile notifications

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

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.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (p3055-sidebyside.mp4)

References

[1]
Adamczyk, P. D., and Bailey, B. P. If not now, when?: the effects of interruption at different moments within task execution. In Proc. CHI (2004).
[2]
Böhmer, M., Hecht, B., Schöning, J., Krüger, A., and Bauer, G. Falling asleep with angry birds, facebook and kindle: a large scale study on mobile application usage. In Proc. of MobileHCI (2011).
[3]
Church, K., and de Oliveira, R. What's up with whatsapp? comparing mobile instant messaging behaviors with traditional sms. In Proc. MobileHCI (2013).
[4]
Cutrell, E., Czerwinski, M., and Horvitz, E. Notification, disruption, and memory: Effects of messaging interruptions on memory and performance. In Proc. Interact (2001).
[5]
Czerwinski, M., Cutrell, E., and Horvitz, E. Instant messaging and interruption: influence of task type on performance. In Proc. OZCHI (2000).
[6]
Czerwinski, M., Horvitz, E., and Wilhite, S. A diary study of task switching and interruptions. In Proc. CHI (2004).
[7]
Felt, A. P., Egelman, S., and Wagner, D. Ifive got 99 problems, but vibration ain't one: a survey of smartphone users' concerns. In Proc. SPSM (2012).
[8]
Fischer, J. E., Greenhalgh, C., and Benford, S. Investigating episodes of mobile phone activity as indicators of opportune moments to deliver notifications. In Proc. MobileHCI (2011).
[9]
Fischer, J. E., Yee, N., Bellotti, V., Good, N., Benford, S., and Greenhalgh, C. Effects of content and time of delivery on receptivity to mobile interruptions. In Proc. MobileHCI (2010).
[10]
Henze, N., and Pielot, M. App stores: external validity for mobile hci. interactions 20, 2 (2013).
[11]
Henze, N., Pielot, M., Poppinga, B., Schinke, T., and Boll, S. My app is an experiment: Experience from user studies in mobile app stores. IJMHCI (2011).
[12]
Ichikawa, F., Chipchase, J., and Grignani, R. Where's the phone? a study of mobile phone location in public spaces. In Proc. Mobility (2005).
[13]
Iqbal, S. T., and Horvitz, E. Notifications and awareness: a field study of alert usage and preferences. In Proc. CSCW (2010).
[14]
Kim, H., Kim, G. J., Park, H. W., and Rice, R. E. Configurations of relationships in different media: Ftf, email, instant messenger, mobile phone, and sms. Computer-Mediated Communication (2007).
[15]
Leiva, L., Böhmer, M., Gehring, S., and Krüger, A. Back to the app: the costs of mobile application interruptions. In Proc. MobileHCI (2012).
[16]
Mark, G., Voida, S., and Cardello, A. "a pace not dictated by electrons": an empirical study of work without email. In Proc. CHI (2012).
[17]
McMillan, D., Morrison, A., Brown, O., Hall, M., and Chalmers, M. Further into the wild: Running worldwide trials of mobile systems. In Proc. Pervasive (2010).
[18]
Oulasvirta, A., Rattenbury, T., Ma, L., and Raita, E. Habits make smartphone use more pervasive. Personal Ubiquitous Computing (2012).
[19]
Pielot, M., de Oliveira, R., Kwak, H., and Oliver, N. Didn't you see my message? predicting attentiveness to mobile instant messages. In Proc. CHI (2014).
[20]
Tukey, J. W. Exploratory data analysis. 1977.
[21]
Wiese, J., Saponas, T. S., and Brush, A. Phoneprioception: enabling mobile phones to infer where they are kept. In Proc. CHI (2013).

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Detection and Impact of Debit/Credit Card Fraud: Victims' ExperiencesProceedings of the 2024 European Symposium on Usable Security10.1145/3688459.3688464(235-260)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Pinning, Sorting, and Categorizing Notifications: A Mixed-methods Usage and Experience Study of Mobile Notification-management FeaturesProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36785798:3(1-27)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Privacy Slider: Fine-Grain Privacy Control for SmartphonesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765198:MHCI(1-31)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Large-scale assessment of mobile notifications

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2014
    4206 pages
    ISBN:9781450324731
    DOI:10.1145/2556288
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 26 April 2014

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. apps
    2. in the wild
    3. large-scale
    4. mobile hci
    5. mobile phone
    6. notification

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    CHI '14
    Sponsor:
    CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2014
    Ontario, Toronto, Canada

    Acceptance Rates

    CHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 465 of 2,043 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

    Upcoming Conference

    CHI 2025
    ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2025
    Yokohama , Japan

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)299
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)33
    Reflects downloads up to 16 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Detection and Impact of Debit/Credit Card Fraud: Victims' ExperiencesProceedings of the 2024 European Symposium on Usable Security10.1145/3688459.3688464(235-260)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
    • (2024)Pinning, Sorting, and Categorizing Notifications: A Mixed-methods Usage and Experience Study of Mobile Notification-management FeaturesProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36785798:3(1-27)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
    • (2024)Privacy Slider: Fine-Grain Privacy Control for SmartphonesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765198:MHCI(1-31)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
    • (2024)Investigating User-perceived Impacts of Contextual Factors on Opportune MomentsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765148:MHCI(1-28)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
    • (2024)"I Want Lower Tone for Work-Related Notifications": Exploring the Effectiveness of User-Assigned Notification Alerts in Improving User Speculation of and Attendance to Mobile NotificationsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765128:MHCI(1-25)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
    • (2024)Body-Based Augmented Reality Feedback During ConversationsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36764918:MHCI(1-22)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
    • (2024)Towards Intelligent Wearable AssistantsCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3678989(618-621)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Peer-Awareness to Support Learning: An In-the-wild Study on Notification TimingCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677576(14-18)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
    • (2024)SensorBricks: a Collaborative Tangible Sensor Toolkit to Support the Development of Data LiteracyProceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3623509.3633378(1-17)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Designing for Human-Agent Alignment: Understanding what humans want from their agentsExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650948(1-6)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media