Unobtrusive notification based on auditory changes in ambient music

Notifications are an indispensable aspect of the user experience with smart devices. However, the increased usage of smart devices yielded proportional increase in notifications. Research has shown that increased notifications may reduce the efficiency of users during tasks, as they are interrupted, and their attention is drawn toward the notification. Therefore, our work investigates a novel notification method based on ambient music, which is background music that was found to unobtrusively motivate users and increase their focus during work. Accordingly, we designed a preliminary study to investigate increased music loudness and duration of increase as basic parameters for designing unobtrusive ambient music-based notifications. Based on extracted insights from our previous study, we follow with a deeper study comparing user impressions and usability of ambient-music notifications with those of common notification. Our results show that most of the participants were able to recognize our notifications, while having minimal effect on their concentration during the task. We discuss some challenges in designing notifications based on ambient music, especially about user preferences of sound loudness and its relation to task type. Lastly, we provide our conclusion and discuss future research direction.