Wait a second! Assessing the impact of different desktop push notification types on software developers

Abstract

Push notifications, which are at the core of most modern productivity and social tools, come in different shapes and sizes - all competing for one’s attention while creating the illusion of multitasking. At best, a notification may intervene in support of a primary task (e.g., a note about the correct use of a library), and at worst a notification may result in a complete context switch (e.g., answering an urgent and unrelated email). This paper presents a controlled single blind study conducted with 65 software professionals with the aim to further understand how different types of notifications may affect people during an immersive task. Insights are drawn from various angles, including mouse pointer logs, session recordings, temporal measures (e.g., time on task and time to resume task) as well as subjective workload assessments. Results indicate that participants who received either actionable or informational interventions managed to resume their tasks more efficiently than those who received actionable or informational intrusions. Actionable intrusions had a significant impact on overall task duration and levels of perceived effort while informational intrusions, which were largely ignored, had the largest impact on the participant’s ability to resume the task efficiently, which also resulted in high levels of frustration. The time to decide whether to engage with a notification was also a factor that contributed to the overall task duration, and this was particularly noticed when an actionable intervention was presented, resulting in a significant impact on mental demand and perceived performance.