Video:

For current mobile phone users, it is possible to set a custom ringtone for a contact. But for some noisy or dynamic environments, vibration notification for incoming calls or SMSs could be more effective than ringtones. We conducted an experiment to understand how mobile phone users perceive the urgency of ten simple vibration patterns that are created from four basic signals: short on, short off, long on, and long off. We found that users can reliably distinguish at least four levels of urgency. Based on the experiment result, we developed “Vibration Notification for Calls and SMSs”, an Android app, which allows users to assign different urgency priorities for the contacts.

Paper:

Bahador Saket, Chrisnawan Prasojo, Yongfeng Huang, Shengdong Zhao. Designing an Effective Vibration-Based Notification Interface for Mobile Phones. CSCW 2013.