Qualitative Investigation of Multi-Device Notifications

Users are confronted with more and more notifications in their lives. Multiple device types in the users' environment use visual, tactile and auditory cues to inform them about messages, events, and updates. All these devices differ in the used modalities to inform the users and in the offered configuration options for these modalities. Prior work investigated the distracting effects of notifications and how people interact with notifications. However, related work often only focuses on one platform at a time. Instead, we use interviews to investigate how users experience and deal with notifications generated by their different devices in their everyday lives. Our results show that users developed strategies to deal with notifications on their devices such as disabling (or not enabling) notifications, uninstalling applications, using do-not-disturb functionality, muting devices or even putting devices away. Only few users change the notification settings on their devices. As a consequence, the default settings selected by the device manufactures can drastically change how notifications are affecting users.