An in-situ study of mobile phone notifications

Reviewer: Srini Ramaswamy

The observation that people actively respond to smartphone notifications (within minutes), even if their phones are on silent mode, highlights the intrusive and addictive nature of notifications and the underlying urge of human beings to remain connected. This paper attempts to study the nature of these messages and how people deal with them in their everyday lives. The paper reaffirms what we notice with this technology, that developers innovate to push notification messages to their users, using a combination of visual, auditory, and/or haptic alerts, even when the user is not actively using the application. Such techniques raise concerns about the real nature of "ubiquity" in such applications. Although limited to a time span of one week, the study reports that its users had to deal with an average of 65 notifications daily, with most notifications peaking during lunchtime and after work hours. Email notifications were observed to be from work, while others were mainly not work related. The correlations between notifications and corresponding positive and negative emotional effects on the users are interesting, with work-related notifications leading to negative emotional effects, and social networking messages causing positive emotional states. Interestingly, it corroborates and possibly supports what organizations are increasingly attempting to do, that is, allowing employees to engage in social networking activities at work. The paper also reports that some people manage their time more effectively by postponing notifications. There are some limitations to the study, such as low sample size and the ignoring of response to notifications via other applications (for example, desktop email). Nevertheless, this is a very interesting study that has important consequences for designing workplace policies and environments. Online Computing Reviews Service