Field study with phone logging and diaries · 2014

An in-situ study of mobile phone notifications

Pielot M, Church K, de Oliveira R

What it found

People handled about 63 notifications a day, mostly from messaging and email, and usually looked at them within minutes, whether or not the phone was on silent.

Where the evidence stops

Fifteen people in 2014; today's numbers are likely different. Descriptive, not an experiment.

How it shapes Pursue

Pursue

Context for how crowded the notification space already is before Pursue says anything.

A design input, not evidence that Pursue works.

Cited in

  1. 01Do phone notifications hurt focus, even if I don't check them?Yes. In a 2015 Florida State University experiment, simply receiving a notification hurt performance on an attention-demanding task about as much as calling or texting, even when people never touched the phone. In a field experiment with 221 adults (Kushlev et al., 2016), people reported more inattention in the week their alerts were on.Interruptions and attention

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