DataHalo: A Customizable Notification Visualization System for Personalized and Longitudinal Interactions

People struggle with the overflow of smartphone notifications but often face two challenges: (1) prioritizing the informative notifications as they wish and (2) retaining the delivered information as long as they want to utilize it. In this paper, we present DataHalo, a customizable notification visualization system that represents notifications as prolonged ambient visualizations on the home screen. DataHalo supports keyword-based filtering and categorization, and draws graphical marks based on time-varying importance model to enable longitudinal interaction with the notifications. We evaluated DataHalo through a usability study (N = 17), from which we improved the interface. We then conducted a three-week deployment study (N = 12) to assess how people use DataHalo in their domestic contexts. Our study revealed that people generated various visualization settings for different kinds of apps. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative findings, we discussed implications for supporting effective notification management through customizable ambient visualizations.