Should I take this call? Understanding interruption response decision-making in mobile phones

Mobile phones not only increase our availability for communication anytime, anywhere, but also interrupt us anytime, anywhere. This paper empirically examines the role of local context (e.g. activity/location where one receives the call) vs. the relational context (e.g. what the phone call is about and from whom) in how people make decisions to answer or ignore phone call. Using both quantitative (N=101) and qualitative (N=10) methods, we gathered data on people's cellphone handling practices. Analysis of the data reveals that 1) people are influenced by the availability or unavailability of relational context in making call handling decisions and are rarely influenced by their local context alone; 2) people predict the value of a call to be significantly different before engaging in the call than the value they perceive after the call. Our qualitative data confirmed that the low availability of relational context information not only led to misjudgment of call value but also suboptimal call handling decisions. Together our findings suggest that designing cell phone interfaces that display relational context information can support people in accurately gauging the value of incoming calls to appropriate response decisions in social and professional contexts.