89% of smartphone interactions are initiated by users, only 11% by notifications; participants interact with their phones about every 5 minutes regardless of context

Why Are Smartphones Disruptive? An Empirical Study of Smartphone Use in Real-Life Contexts. Maxi Heitmayer, Saadi Lahlou. Computers in Human Behavior, November 21 2020, 106637. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106637

Rolf Degen's take: https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1330053912859193345

Highlights

• 89% of Smartphone interactions are initiated by users, only 11% by notifications.

• Many smartphone interactions are unconscious and go unnoticed by users.

• Participants interact with their phones about every 5 minutes regardless of context.

• Focusing on notification-design only is not a viable option to reduce smartphone interactions.

Abstract: Notifications are one of the core functionalities of smartphones. Previous research suggests they can be a major disruption to the professional and private lives of users. This paper presents evidence from a mixed-methods study using first-person wearable video cameras, comprising 200 hours of audio-visual first-person, and self-confrontation interview footage with 1130 unique smartphone interactions (N=37 users), to situate and analyse the disruptiveness of notifications in real-world contexts. We show how smartphone interactions are driven by a complex set of routines and habits users develop over time. We furthermore observe that while the duration of interactions varies, the intervals between interactions remain largely invariant across different activity and location contexts, and for being alone or in the company of others. Importantly, we find that 89% of smartphone interactions are initiated by users, not by notifications. Overall this suggests that the disruptiveness of smartphones is rooted within learned user behaviours, not devices.

Keywords: Video analysisNotificationsSmartphonesAddictionSEBE