Reflective Spring Cleaning: Using Personal Informatics to Support Infrequent Notification Personalization

Distracting mobile notifications are a high-profile problem but previous research suggests notification management tools are underused because of the barriers users face in relation to the perceived benefits. We posit that users might be more motivated to personalize if they could view contextual data for how personalizations would have impacted their recent notifications. We propose the ‘Reflective Spring Cleaning’ approach to support notification management through infrequent personalization with visualization of collected notification data. To simplify and contextualize key trends in a user’s notifications, we framed these visualizations within a novel who-what-when data abstraction. We evaluated it through a four-week longitudinal study: 21 participants logged their notifications before and after a personalization session that included suggestions for notification management contextualized against visualizations of their recent notifications. A debriefing interview described their new experience after two more weeks of logging. Our approach encouraged users to critically reflect on their notifications, which frequently inspired them to personalize and improved the experience of the majority.