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NotificationManager: Personal Boundary Management on Mobile Devices

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (INTERACT 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12935))

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Abstract

The growing use of mobile devices that are available everywhere can blur the boundaries between life domains work and life. The increasing number of notifications on smartphones leads to interruptions that might be unrelated to the current life domain and task and are therefore disruptive. Despite some tools there is a gap between the preferred and the actual separation of life domains. In this paper we show how concepts from the field of boundary management can be applied for notification management on mobile devices. We present a formal model of the semantic structure of life domains, which is based on the concepts of integration and segmentation from boundary theory. We introduce an app for the management of notifications on Android smartphones that leverages on this formal model. In a field study we evaluated the app with real-life notifications. The results show a significant reduction of the gap between actual and preferred boundary management.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the participants of the study as well as the members of the Cooperative Media Lab at the University of Bamberg.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human-Computer Interaction Group, University of Bamberg, 96045, Bamberg, Germany

    Tom Gross & Anna-Lena Mueller

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  1. Tom Gross
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Correspondence to Tom Gross .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Ardito

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Rosa Lanzilotti

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Alessio Malizia

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Helen Petrie

  5. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Antonio Piccinno

  6. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Giuseppe Desolda

  7. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Kori Inkpen

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Gross, T., Mueller, AL. (2021). NotificationManager: Personal Boundary Management on Mobile Devices. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12935. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85610-6_15

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