What Do Smartphone Users Do when They Sense Phone Notifications?

Abstract

Smartphone users receive a variety of notifications on their phone every day. To understand how smartphone users deal with notifications, recent mobile receptivity research has started studying notification management and attendance behavior. However, what do smartphone users do when they sense a notification, such as hearing the sound or feeling the vibration before they spot it? We present a study investigating smartphone users' behavior starting from the moment when they sense a notification, including speculating the source and deciding whether and when to look at it, until they attend to it. We explore how users' behaviors vary according to the situation, what factors affect the behaviors, and in what situations users need particular help from a notification system to be better aware of and to accurately judge the source of a notification. We expect the findings will provide useful implications for the design of future notification alert system.