Testing the public's response to receiving alert notifications on mobile phones in France: challenges and prospects

Natural events that have recently occurred in France (forest fires, flash floods) remind how necessary it is to be able to alert the population in appropriate time and with explicit messages, specifying the nature of the danger in progress and what should be done about it. Deployed in June 2022, the so-called FR-Alert platform will allow the broadcasting of an alert by notification (via cellular broadcasting and via geo-located SMS in 2023), on the phones of people located in real time in the danger zone. However, how do we plan a comprehensible notification, understandable by most people, to keep everyone out of danger in the current situation? This article proposes to answer these ambitious questions, by analyzing the perception of messages tested with a varied public (163 participants), in situation during simulated alerts, and by comparing the results obtained in the different contexts (students and teachers in a university, crisis managers and workers in an industrial-port context), to test if there are standardized or random individual reactions. Even if these early findings need to be confirmed using larger samples, they show the importance of structuring the content of the notification. More interestingly, contextual and social effects emerge, and the latter shall be considered in FR-Alert, if authorities want to send a well-understood message for most of the people in the danger area.

Automated summary

This article analyzes the perception of messages sent to different publics during simulated alerts and compares the reactions in different contexts. The results show the importance of structuring the content of the notification and the need to consider contextual and social effects to ensure a well-understood message for most people.