Doing Battle With Notifications

Notifications have become increasingly annoying, causing us to start turning them off altogether. Let’s fix notifications so they’ll work for us!

If you’re one of those people who finds yourself deleting the same unwanted promotional emails every day rather than take a second to hit ‘unsubscribe’, you’re in for a lot of hurt. Wearable technology is here, and the notifications aren’t just on a screen in your pocket or desktop anymore – they’re on your wrist.

Apple Watch has already observed its first critics, who’ve found the buzzing on the wrist to be quite frustrating when it happens for no good reason. Evan Niu wrote in Time why he’s returning his Apple Watch: “It appeared that most of my interactions with the Apple Watch revolved around the notifications it would send me. Texts would come in. It tells me to stand up. There’s a thunderstorm brewing tonight.” There’s always something, and because it’s on the wrist, it’s endlessly distracting.

Being constantly interrupted is terrible for focus and productivity, though of course, it’s possible to turn off notifications. The options are to either turn off all of it en masse, or to go into each and every app and function to tailor what you’ll allow to bother you. This is where it gets annoying, because most of the time you’ll want some notifications: I want to know when I have an email, or when someone sends a Direct Message on Twitter. I don’t want to know every time I’m retweeted or get a ‘like’ on Facebook. Getting this right demands some time, as you have to go into the app itself and set up *what* should be alerted, and then go into the phone settings to determine *how* you’ll be alerted – sound or buzz? Lock screen message or just the little red dot? So many choices, so little time.

“It’s incredibly unwieldy to hand-curate all the potential combinations of what you want,” Steven Levy, editor-in-chief of Medium’s Backchannel, said at NYC Media Lab’s “Future of Notifications” panel. “To do it for every app is incredibly burdensome. The danger is that in order to have some control over the level of what’s being notified, we’re going to turn it over to these big artificial intelligence powers [Google, Apple, and so on]. That means giving up some privacy.”.

One way to do this would to link notifications to your calendar, meaning notifications would be held off during meetings, and also at night. But the trend is going in a different direction: people are increasingly stifling all notifications at the source. A report from Urban Airship found that only 4 out of 10 people installing a news app agree to receive notifications, and the number has been dropping.

Notifications are in need of an overhaul, but even if new apps are designed with careful consideration on how to do this without irritating people, much damage has already been done: “We have to deal with the baggage of all the other apps and products we had no hand in building,” Noah Chestnut, product lead on the new BuzzFeed news app, said at the “Future of Notifications” panel. “We have to be smarter about what the app actually does when we make our pitch to say, hey, do you want notifications? How does context matter?”.

Because in essence there was a reason why we signed up to those notifications in the first place: we wanted information. It just got a little out of hand, is all. But it doesn’t have to be this way, writes Steven Levy on Medium: “Instead of making you compulsively visit dozens of apps, the apps vow to send you the most important items they generate, so you can get a taste of what’s happening without opening the app. Done right, notifications are a wonderful Feed of Feeds, weeding out the stuff you really need to see from all the usual chaff in the stream.”.

Thinking of creating an app for your business? Be sure to take time tailoring your notifications to meet the needs of your consumers. Follow the UK2 Blog for more helpful business tips.