"Shhh...be Quiet!" Reducing the Unwanted Interruptions of Notification Permission Prompts on Chrome

Push notifications are an extremely useful feature. In web browsers, they allow users to receive timely updates even if the website is not currently open. On Chrome, the feature has become extremely popular since its inception in 2015, but it is also the least likely to be accepted by users. Our telemetry shows that, although 74% of all permission prompts are about notifications, they are also the least likely to be granted with only a 10% grant rate on desktop and 21% grant rate on Android. In order to preserve its utility for the websites and to reduce unwanted interruptions for the users, we designed and tested a new UI for notification permission prompt on Chrome. In this paper, we conduct two large-scale studies of Chrome users interactions with the notifications permission prompt in the wild, in order to understand how users interact with such prompts and to evaluate a novel design that we introduced in Chrome version 80 in February 2020. Our main goal for the redesigned UI is to reduce the unwanted interruptions due to notification permission prompts for Chrome users, the frequency at which users have to suppress them and the ease of changing a previously made choice. Our results, based on an A/B test using behavioral data from more than 40 million users who interacted with more than 100 million prompts on more than 70 thousand websites, show that the new UI is very effective at reducing the unwanted interruptions and their frequency (up to 30% fewer unnecessary actions on the prompts), with a minimal impact (less than 5%) on the grant rates, across all types of users and websites. We achieve these results thanks to a novel adaptive activation mechanism coupled with a block list of interrupting websites, which is derived from crowd-sourced telemetry from Chrome clients.

• Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization

• Information Retrieval and the Web