Decomposing responses to mobile notifications

Turner, Liam D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4877-5289 2017. Decomposing responses to mobile notifications. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Notifications from mobile devices frequently prompt us with information, either to merely inform us or to elicit a reaction. This has led to increasing research interest in considering an individual’s interruptibility prior to issuing notifications, in order for them to be positively received. To achieve this, predictive models need to be built from previous response behaviour where the individual’s interruptibility is known. However, there are several degrees of freedom in achieving this, from different definitions in what it means to be interruptible and a notification to be successful, to various methods for collecting data, and building predictive models. The primary focus of this thesis is to improve upon the typical convention used for labelling interruptibility, an area which has had limited direct attention. This includes the proposal of a flexible framework, called the decision-on-information-gain model, which passively observes response behaviour in order to support various interruptibility definitions. In contrast, previous studies have largely surrounded the investigation of influential contextual factors on predicting interruptibility, using a broad labelling convention that relies on notifications being responded to fully and potentially a survey needing to be completed. The approach is supported through two in-the-wild studies of Android notifications, one with 11,000 notifications across 90 users, and another with 32,000,000 across 3000 users. Analysis of these datasets shows that: a) responses to notifications is a decisionmaking process, whereby individuals can be reachable but not receptive to their content, supporting the premise of the approach; b) the approach is implementable on typical Android devices and capable of adapting to different notification designs and user preferences; and c) the different labels produced by the model are predictable using data sources that do not require invasive permissions or persistent background monitoring; however there are notable performance differences between different machine learning strategies for training and evaluation.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	6 July 2017
Last Modified:	02 Nov 2022 11:28
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/102135

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