Multi-format Notifications for Multi-tasking

We studied people's perception of and response to a set of visual and auditory notifications issued in a multi-task environment. Primary findings show that participants' reactive preference ratings of notifications delivered in various contexts during experimentation appear to contradict their reflective, overall ratings of the notification formats when elicited independently of contextual information, indicating a potential difficulty in people's abilities to articulate their preferences in the absence of context. We also found people to vary considerably in their preferences for different notification formats delivered in different contexts, such that simple approaches to selecting notification delivery formats will be dissatisfying to users a substantial portion of the time. These findings can inform the designs of future systems: rather than target the general user alone, they should strive to better understand each user individually.