In Proceedings of Cross-Surface '15: Workshop on Interacting with Multi-Device Ecologies in the Wild, in conjunction with ACM ITS ’15, November 15, 2015, Funchal, Madeira, 4 pages.
Many applications and online services on our mobile phones notify us about messages, emails, or status updates. These notifications can be disruptive. People currently use multiple mobile and wearable devices that can run the same application or service simultaneously. This aggravates the issue of disruptive notifications. For example, a new email notification can trigger vibrations or sounds on a tablet, laptop, smartphone and smartwatch at the same time. Additionally, notifications can be sent from one device to another (e.g., an internet-connected thermostat that notifies a user on their smartphone). In this position paper, we discuss the key challenge of handling and managing multi-device notifications. We outline open issues in addressing this problem and discuss opportunities for future work.