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Preferred notification modalities depending on the location and the location-based activity

Published: 09 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Smartphones offer different modalities to inform about incoming notifications. They are perceived differently in terms of pleasantness and disruptiveness, depending on the receptivity and interruptibility of the user, among others. Contextual factors such as the user's location, activity, and task engagement level further influence this perception. Within a lab study with 40 tech-savvy participants, we investigated suitable notification modalities for different place types. We found that a user's receptivity, the disruptiveness of a notification, and the task engagement correlate and that they differ per place type with statistical significance and small to large effect sizes. Due to their unobtrusive nature, silent mode and vibration are preferred notification modalities at all places - silent mode especially at "do not disturb" locations ("library", "movie theater"), at places where users tend to be in company ("café", "restaurant"), or where users have to focus ("university", "work"). Ringtone is considered obtrusive and undesired and is only tolerated at a few places at which users tend to be alone ("home") or which are rather loud so that the auditory alert does not disturb others too much ("gas station").

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  • (2023)AutoProfile: An Intelligent Profile Switching System for SmartphonesIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2022.314120522:6(3151-3164)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2023
  • (2022)Extracting and Understanding Call-to-actions of Push-NotificationsNatural Language Processing and Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-08473-7_14(147-159)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2022
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UbiComp/ISWC '19 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers
    September 2019
    1234 pages
    ISBN:9781450368698
    DOI:10.1145/3341162
    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].

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    Published: 09 September 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. location-based activity
    2. place types
    3. preferred notification modality
    4. smartphone notifications

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    View all
    • (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
    • (2023)AutoProfile: An Intelligent Profile Switching System for SmartphonesIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2022.314120522:6(3151-3164)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2023
    • (2022)Extracting and Understanding Call-to-actions of Push-NotificationsNatural Language Processing and Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-08473-7_14(147-159)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2022
    • (2020)Can you Turn it Off?Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34151624:CSCW2(1-18)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2020
    • (2020)Designing the Expressivity of Multiple Smart Things for Intuitive and Unobtrusive InteractionsProceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3357236.3395450(2007-2019)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2020

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