Exploring Non-Urgent Smart Home Notifications using a Smart Plant System.

With the rise of the Internet of Things, home appliances become connected and they can proactively provide status information to users. Facing a steadily increasing number of notification sources, it is unclear how information from smart home devices should be provided without overloading the users’ attention. In this paper, we investigate the design of non-urgent smart home notifications using a smart plant system. Based on feedback from focus groups, we designed four notification types and compared them in an eight-week in-situ study. We show that notifications displayed on smart home devices are preferred to those received on smartphones. Event-based notifications are unobtrusive, actionable and are preferred to persistent notifications. We derive guidelines that address the need of being in control, opportune locations for notification delivery at opportune moments, notification blindness, the importance of discretizing continuous information, and combining related notifications.