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A field study in ten homes was conducted to understand what influences users' acceptability of notifications in the home environment. The key finding is that perceived message urgency is the primary indicator of acceptability of notifications in the home-if people think a message is urgent, they want the message to be shown immediately, regardless of what they are doing at the time of notification. The study also shows that the acceptability of low-urgent and medium-urgent messages could be improved by taking into account mental activity load at the time of notification. No effect of physical activity was found on acceptability. The results suggest that to improve the scheduling of notifications in the home, notification systems need a mechanism assessing both the message urgency and the mental activity load, whereas physical activity can be ignored. From a methodological point of view, it is difficult to measure acceptability of notifications in a realistic setting, given the need to balance experimental control with realistic context. The present paper suggests a way to introduce controlled notifications and subjective measurements of acceptability in homes.

Recent field experiments on acceptability of notifications in the home showed that people generally want to be informed of urgent messages as soon as possible, whereas non-urgent messages should not be presented at all. A possible way to improve the acceptability of a notification might be to adjust the presentation mode and the timing of notifications to the message content and to the state of the user. For example, acceptability might be improved by considering user activities when selecting the best time to present the message. The relation between acceptability, presentation mode and timing has not been formally studied in a controlled home setting before. This paper presents the results of a user study, in which ten participant couples were asked to engage in everyday home activities, and to subjectively rate factors that were expected to influence acceptability. The study was situated in a living room laboratory in which the user activities and the timing of notifications were controlled. Questionnaire data was evaluated using cluster analysis in order to construct a semantic model that describes the relationship between user, system and environment. The key findings in the present study are: (1) acceptability could be improved by adjusting the level of intrusiveness of the presentation to message urgency: urgent messages should be presented intrusively, medium-urgent messages unobtrusively, and (2) non-urgent messages should be postponed until the message urgency has increased, or skipped if the message urgency never exceeds the predefined presentation threshold.. Surprisingly, the user activities at the time of notification were not found to influence acceptability. These findings have resulted in a model of acceptability of notifications for the design of future home notification systems.

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Several factors were examined towardsconsidering what influences users' acceptability of alerfing and informational messages in a field study conducted at fen homes. Through the simulation study message urgency was found to be a better predictor of acceptability than the degree of user engagement during ongoing activities. A model is proposedfor including a range of additional factors expected to influence acceptahility. The factors will be examined in forthcoming studies.