The Attention Kitchen: Comparing Modalities for Smart Home Notifications in a Cooking Scenario

Abstract

A steadily increasing number of notifications, auditory, visual or ambient, competes for the user’s attention. Frequent unsuitable notifications can lead to a breakdown in efficiency and increase error rates. This paper compares the effectiveness, disruptiveness, and user experience of three different notification modalities: OnObject, ambient On-Environment, and On-Smartphone notifications. In a user study with 24 participants, we evaluate the three notification modalities during a cooking task where users were frequently exposed to notifications. Our results show that ambient On-Environment notifications minimize the time in which users can Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. MUM 2021, December 5-8, 2021 , Leuven, Belgium © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8643-2/21/05. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3490632.3490660 resume their primary task. Ambient On-Environment notifications were also perceived as least disrupting compared to the other two notification modalities. We discuss the design requirements for nondisruptive notifications in smart home environments and conclude with future strategies for notifying users at different urgency levels.