Considerate home notification systems: a field study of acceptability of notifications in the home

Abstract

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.

Personalization for unobtrusive service interaction

“…Although participants had to adopt the personas roles and adjust to personas needs, this is difficult when they really have another needs. In the study made by Vastenburg et al [43], they pointed out that the more urgent the message was considered to be, the higher the level of intrusiveness should be. In our results, the content and presentation Fig.…”

“…To evaluate the user acceptance of the system and determine whether the interaction has been personalized and adapted properly, we used an adapted IBM PostStudy questionnaire [26] in conjunction with the ques- [43]. On the one hand, IBM Post-Study is a questionnaire that measures user satisfaction with system usability.…”

“…Ho and Intille [23] compared different mental or task stages during which interruption occurs and suggested that proactive messages delivered when the user is transitioning between two activities may be received more positively. Vastenburg et al [43] conducted a user study of acceptability of notifications to find out what factors influence the acceptability of notifications.…”

Multi-format Notifications for Multi-tasking

“…Vastenburg, et al [15] showed that in the home, the desirability of notifications hinged on the contextual feature of urgency alone. Other researchers focus on other features, aside from urgency.…”

Again?!! The Emotional Experience of Social Notification Interruptions

“…Previous work informs us when during an activity is best to interrupt users [4,15], how to best design software to manage this [3,13,14], and how to interrupt users in specialized domains [1,17]. The literature does not help us understand for what reasons users should be interrupted.…”