Field study with phone logging and experience sampling · 2016
My Phone and Me: Understanding People's Receptivity to Mobile Notifications
Mehrotra A, Pejovic V, Vermeulen J, Hendley R, Musolesi M
What it found
How quickly people respond to a notification, and how disruptive it feels, depends on what they are doing: the kind of task, how far through it they are, and how complex it is. It also depends on who sent it and how it is presented. Even important or useful notifications were disruptive at the wrong moment, and personality made a large difference.
Where the evidence stops
Twenty people, with many notifications each, and correlational data. It measures response and felt disruption, not long-term benefit.
How it shapes Pursue
The reason Pursue weighs the moment as heavily as the message: useful help can still be wrong right now.
A design input, not evidence that Pursue works.
Cited in
- 01When is the right moment for a reminder or a nudge?When the person is able to take it in, which changes from moment to moment. In a trial with 1,255 users of a workplace well-being app (Bidargaddi et al., 2018), the same message made people about 4% more likely to use the app in the next day, and about 12% more likely at 12:30 on weekends.Timing and receptivity
- 02When is it better for an AI assistant to say nothing?Whenever speaking would cost more attention than it gives back: when the person can't take it in, the evidence is thin, or nothing needs to change. The 2018 framework for just-in-time support (Nahum-Shani et al.) counts giving nothing as a designed option, and declining uncertain cases makes a system's other answers more reliable (Geifman and El-Yaniv, 2017).Timing and receptivity