The influence of concurrent mobile notifications on individual responses

Abstract

Notifications on mobile devices punctuate our daily lives to provide information and prompt for further engagement. Investigations into the cognitive processes involved in consuming notifications are common across the literature, however most research to date investigates notifications in isolation of one another. In reality, notifications often coexist together, forming a “stack”, however the behavioural implications of this on the response towards individual notifications has received limited attention. Through an in-the-wild study of 1,889 Android devices, we observe user behaviour in a stream of 30 million notifications from over 6,000 applications. We find distinct strategies for user management of the notification stack within usage sessions, beyond the behaviour patterns observable from responses to individual notifications. From the analysis, we make recommendations for collecting and reporting data from mobile applications to improve validity through timely responses, and capture potential confounding features.