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Today's smartphones will issue a notification immediately after an event occurs, repeating unanswered notifications in fixed time intervals. The disadvantage of this issue-and-repeat strategy is that notifications can appear in inconvenient situations and thus are perceived as annoying and interrupting. The authors study the mobile context as inferred through a phone's sensors for both answered and ignored notifications. They conducted a large-scale, longitudinal study via the Google Play store and observed 6,581 notifications from 79 different users over 76 days. Their derived model can predict opportune moments to issue notifications with approximately 77 percent accuracy. Their findings could lead to intelligent strategies to issue unobtrusive notifications on today's smartphones at no extra cost. This article is part of a special issue on managing attention.
Poppinga et al. (Wed,) studied this question.