NotifyMeHere: intelligent notification delivery in multi-device environments

Personal interactions and information access are happening more and more through the mediation of computing devices of various types all around us. In our daily life we use many computing devices running different versions of the same application such as email clients or social media platforms, which alert users about a new piece of information or event on all devices. In this paper we first present a study investigating the factors influencing users’ decisions in handling notifications in a multi-device environment. We collected 57,242 in-the-wild notifications from 24 users over a period of 21 days. We found that users’ decisions in handling notifications are impacted by their physical activity, location, network connectivity, application category and the device used for handling the previous notification. Finally, we show that an individualized model can predict the device on which the user will handle a notification in the given context with 82% specificity and 91% sensitivity.