Notification Manager: Reducing Interruptions with Boundary Management Concepts

The wide spread of smartphones and the increasing usage of possibilities for working from home offered by companies also leads to an increased demand for work-related communication outside the physical workspaces as well as private communication during work. Thus, the separation of the domains work and private life is getting more difficult. The high amount of notifications, especially on smartphones, causes frequent interruptions and disturbances through domains that do not concern the current task. Though supporting tools exist, a gap between preferred and actual separation of work and private life still exists. In this contribution we explain how concepts of boundary management can be used for notification management on mobile devices. We introduce the Notification Manager, an application for managing notifications on Android smartphones based on the concepts of boundary management. In a field study the application was tested for one week with real notifications.