Making mobile notifications useful, usable and used

Dr. Andreas Komninos

Wait a second…

• Aren’t they already?

Used?

• We receive dozens daily• Certainly used by app

developers!

Study Year Participants Avg/day

Pielot et al. 2014 15 65.3

Visuri et al. 2019 40 313.4

Komninos et al. 2019 40 232.5

Notification Hell

12 hours worth… A “smart” environment…

Used by users?

• Removed by the system• Clicked by the user• Dismissed by the user

Notifications can be

• 2.6% clicked• 9.7% dismissed

In Visuri et al. (2019), users interacted with

just 12.3% of notifications:

• Threshold @ 100-120 notifications per day.

Too many notifications reduce

click ratio, reduce the user experience, and

the amount of received information.

How do people perceive notifications?

Aranda et al. 2016

Coping strategies

• From Aranda et al. (2016)• Put the phone away (bag, box)• Turn on DND (in context, or always)• Select airplane mode• Use the website instead of the app• Uninstall the app• Risk it

• People simply don’t bother with setting up custom rules and settings.

• Fear of missing out

Why this low engagement?• There’s always something to

“clear”: it’s a lot of extra work for the user.

• Maybe notifications are not as USABLE or USEFUL

Weber et al. (2019)

Usable?

• In order to be engaging, the notification must be perceived.

• Missed notification by ringer mode (Mehrotra et al. 2016):• Silent: 14.63%, • Vibrate: 15.38%, • Sound only: 23.75%• Sound+Vibrate: 21.05%

• Others (e.g. Pielot et al. 2016) report a quicker response time to notifications in Vibrate mode (!)

• Users regularly check their device even if it’s in silent mode.

• Users have to manage ringer mode – don’t assume they will do it successfully always. Komninos et al. (2020)

Usable?

Usable?

• Is the notification modality helpful?

• There is a distinct preference towards engagement with specific kinds (Shahami Shirazi et al. 2014) and sources(Lee et al. 2019)

• People are curious – they will speculate upon reception (Chang et al. 2019).• Which app? (39.7%)• Who from? (3.7%)• Or both (49.6%)

• And they will fail…• When the app does not provide a distinctive

sound/vibration pattern (esp. the latter)• When they can’t associate the time/context with a

possible event

Usable?

• Is the notification presentation helpful?• Textual content in the preview is

important (Fischer et al 2010).• Icon on status bar vs. foreground

bubble (Mehrotra et al. 2016)• Bundling of notifications adds little

value (new elements add minimal information) (Visuri et al. 2019)

• CTR improves with adding icons and images to notification body (Bahir 2019)

• Too many items in the drawer can “hide” important notifications (Weber et al. 2019)

Mehrotra et al. 2016

Useful?

• Is the notification timely?• Disruption => Frustration

=> Non-engagement• Much work in this area to

discover opportune moments to defer notifications to (e.g. Poppinga et al. 2014, Okoshi et al. 2017, Pielotet al. 2017)

• Simple time-awareness can also help

Dingler & Pielot 2015

Pielot et al. 2014

Komninos et al. 2019

What’s my target? Be clicked within half a minute

Sahami Shirazi et al. 2014Bahir et al. 2019

What’s my target? Be a messaging app

Sahami Shirazi et al. 2014

Make them useful and usable!

• Have something of value to say (legit!)• Users speculate – Often they expect something

related to their context, if you’re not it, then it’d better be important.

• Attract attention at the right time• Think before you ping: What would be the best

time to alert the user to take action?• Can you ask the user for the right time to defer?

• Attract attention in the right way• Ensure notifications have distinguishable

audio/haptic/visual identity.• Respect potentially private / sensitive times. Use

notification channels, adapt modality based on time and context, adapt to current ringer mode.

Make them useful and usable!

• Say it in the right way!• Textual content is very important:

Carry value!• Use icons/images sparingly to

communicate importance and urgency.• Entropy must be high – don’t just

repeat the same blurb.• Am I doing it right?

• Measure engagement• Take corrective action

“[…] developers should protect users’ attention by being respectful and thoughtful in each notification that is sent.“(Aranda et al. 2016)

Thanks!akomninos@ceid.upatras.grhttp://www.komninos.info

References

Ravit Avraham Bahir, Yisrael Parmet, and Noam Tractinsky. 2019. Effects of Visual Enhancements and Delivery Time on Receptivity of Mobile Push Notifications. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’19), LBW0288:1–LBW0288:6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312993

Yung-Ju Chang, Yi-Ju Chung, and Yi-Hao Shih. 2019. I Think It’s Her: Investigating Smartphone Users’ Speculation about Phone Notifications and Its Influence on Attendance. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interactionwith Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI ’19), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3338286.3340125

Kuan-Yin Chen, Hao-Ping Lee, Chih-Heng Lin, and Yung-Ju Chang. 2017. Who matters: a closer look at interpersonal relationship inmobile interruptibility. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing andProceedings of the 2017 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp ’17), 910–915. https://doi.org/10.1145/3123024.3124569

Tilman Dingler and Martin Pielot. 2015. I’ll be there for you: Quantifying Attentiveness towards Mobile Messaging. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI ’15), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/2785830.2785840

Joel E. Fischer, Nick Yee, Victoria Bellotti, Nathan Good, Steve Benford, and Chris Greenhalgh. 2010. Effects of content and time of delivery on receptivity to mobile interruptions. In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services (MobileHCI ’10), 103–112. https://doi.org/10.1145/1851600.1851620

Andreas Komninos, Jeries Besharat, Vassilios Stefanis, Georgia Gogoulou, and John Garofalakis. 2019. Assessing the perceptibility of smartphone notifications in smart lighting spaces. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments 11, 3: 277–297. https://doi.org/10.3233/AIS-190525

Andreas Komninos, Elton Frengkou, and John Garofalakis. 2018. Predicting User Responsiveness to Smartphone Notifications for Edge Computing. In Ambient Intelligence (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), 3–19.

Andreas Komninos, Elton Frengkou, John Garofalakis. 2020 (forthcoming). Hush now! Context factors behind smartphone ringer mode changes. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Elsevier.

Hao-Ping Lee, Kuan-Yin Chen, Chih-Heng Lin, Chia-Yu Chen, Yu-Lin Chung, Yung-Ju Chang, and Chien-Ru Sun. 2019. Does Who Matter? Studying the Impact of Relationship Characteristics on Receptivity to Mobile IM Messages. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300756

References

Abhinav Mehrotra, Veljko Pejovic, Jo Vermeulen, Robert Hendley, and Mirco Musolesi. 2016. My Phone and Me: Understanding People’s Receptivity to Mobile Notifications. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16), 1021–1032. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858566

T. Okoshi, K. Tsubouchi, M. Taji, T. Ichikawa, and H. Tokuda. 2017. Attention and engagement-awareness in the wild: A large-scale study with adaptive notifications. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), 100–110. https://doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2017.7917856

Martin Pielot, Bruno Cardoso, Kleomenis Katevas, Joan Serrà, Aleksandar Matic, and Nuria Oliver. 2017. Beyond Interruptibility: Predicting Opportune Moments to Engage Mobile Phone Users. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 1, 3: 91:1–91:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3130956

Martin Pielot, Karen Church, and Rodrigo de Oliveira. 2014. An In-situ Study of Mobile Phone Notifications. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Human-computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services (MobileHCI ’14), 233–242. https://doi.org/10.1145/2628363.2628364

Martin Pielot, Rodrigo de Oliveira, Haewoon Kwak, and Nuria Oliver. 2014. Didn’T You See My Message?: Predicting Attentiveness to Mobile Instant Messages. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14), 3319–3328. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2556973

B. Poppinga, W. Heuten, and S. Boll. 2014. Sensor-Based Identification of Opportune Moments for Triggering Notifications. IEEE Pervasive Computing 13, 1: 22–29. https://doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2014.15

Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Niels Henze, Tilman Dingler, Martin Pielot, Dominik Weber, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2014. Large-scale Assessment of Mobile Notifications. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14), 3055–3064. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557189

Aku Visuri, Niels van Berkel, Tadashi Okoshi, Jorge Goncalves, and Vassilis Kostakos. 2019. Understanding smartphone notifications’ user interactions and content importance. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 128: 72–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.03.001

Dominik Weber, Alexandra Voit, and Niels Henze. 2019. Clear All: A Large-Scale Observational Study on Mobile Notification Drawers. In Proceedings of Mensch und Computer 2019 (MuC’19), 361–372. https://doi.org/10.1145/3340764.3340765

Video links• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc0

DjzAHp1s• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAjkk

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