Relevance-Based Notification Severity Control
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current notification systems often distract users engaged in focused activities by providing generic alerts for all communications, lacking the ability to differentiate relevance and requiring extensive user settings, leading to annoying frequency and ineffective control.
Innovation Solution
A computing device determines the relevance of incoming communications to current activities by analyzing their topics and contexts, providing notifications with varying severity based on a predefined threshold, ensuring only relevant communications interrupt the user with proportional alerts.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If generic notification alerts are provided for all communications, then users are kept aware of all received communications, but users engaged in focused activities experience increased distraction and annoyance
Solution Approach 1:
The notification system applies different qualities (severity levels) to different notifications based on their relevance to current user activity. High-relevance notifications receive severe alerts (audible+visual), medium-relevance receive moderate alerts (visual only), and low-relevance notifications are suppressed. This local differentiation resolves the contradiction by making notification delivery reliable for important communications while minimizing distraction from less relevant ones.
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes the parameter of notification severity based on the relevance score calculated from comparing communication topics with current user activity topics. By dynamically adjusting the notification parameter (from suppressed to severe based on relevance threshold), the system maintains reliable delivery of important notifications while reducing harmful distraction from less important ones.
2Adaptability or versatility
If notification control requires extensive user profile settings, then users can customize notification preferences, but the setup process becomes time-consuming and complex
Solution Approach 1:
The notification system performs self-service by automatically analyzing user activity patterns and communication topics to determine relevance scores, then autonomously adjusting notification severity levels without requiring extensive user profile settings. The system serves itself by monitoring current user activity and dynamically adapting notification behavior, thereby providing adaptability while minimizing setup complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary analysis of user activity and communication content before determining notification severity. By pre-calculating relevance scores based on topic comparison and maintaining a history of user activities, the system prepares the necessary information in advance to make intelligent notification decisions without requiring complex user configuration during setup.
3Reliability
If all communications are notified to the user, then no important communication is missed, but the frequency of notifications becomes extremely annoying especially for users participating in multiple social media sites
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies different notification frequencies and severities to different communications based on their local relevance to current user activity. Communications with high relevance to current activity receive severe notifications to ensure awareness, while communications with low relevance are suppressed to reduce overall notification frequency. This local quality differentiation maintains reliability for important communications while reducing annoying frequency overall.
Solution Approach 2:
The notification system dynamically changes the parameter of notification frequency based on the calculated relevance score. By adjusting the frequency parameter from high (for high-relevance communications) to low or zero (for low-relevance communications), the system ensures no important communication is missed while significantly reducing the overall frequency of annoying notifications.
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments of the present invention disclose a method, computer program product, and system for providing a severity of a notification for a communication. A computing device determines a topic and associated information of a current activity, operating on the computing device. The computing device receives a communication and determines the topic and associated information of the communication. The computing device determines a level of relevance between the topic and associated information of the received communication and the topic and associated information of the current activity. The computing device determines whether the level of relevance exceeds a predefined threshold, and in response to determining that the level of relevance exceeds the predefined threshold, the computing device provides a notification, wherein the severity of the notification for the communication is proportional to the level of relevance.