I'm just trying to survive: an ethnographic look at mobile notifications and attention management

Abstract

There is a prevailing sentiment in popular culture that we have become too attached to our phones. Smartphone notifications play a critical role in drawing people's attention to their phones. As user experience researchers on the Android team at Google, we used an ethnographic approach to understand how people experience smartphone notifications. We conducted an ethnographic study of smartphone users in New York City, while engaging members of our product team (including product managers, engineers, and designers) in the data collection and analysis. In this case study, we describe our research methods, what we learned about notifications' role in people's lives, and discuss the impact that our research has had on various product teams at Google.