The Very Difficult Problem of Notifications | Hacker News Reader

The Very Difficult Problem of Notifications

brooksreview.net

15 pointsshowngo9 comments

It's almost like the author has never used android, seeing as android notifications don't have any of the problems described. Notifications show up in a part of the UI you constantly look at but can't actually interact with (the status bar at the top), therefore you always notice when there are notifications but it doesn't really get in your way. You can see all notifications at once by swiping down from the status bar which drops the notification screen in over whatever you were doing, showing all the notifications at once. Because of this, you can have a clear all button. If you don't want to deal with a notification right away, you can just swipe back up and go back to whatever you were doing. Doesn't seem quite so difficult.

I agree, and CM's modifications allow for single notification dismissal with a swipe gesture. I have no idea at all how I would improve Android notifications, certainly not after seeing the more interactive Honeycomb variety.

There's room for improvement in Android's notification system. I get serious notification fatigue with Android. I see that there are 5 or 6 tiny indistinguishable icons up there but I have to pull down the tray to get any useful information. In this sense it's more like an Inbox than a notification system to me. It also treats all notifications equally. To me a missed phone call is a lot more important than application updates. I would prefer to get the higher priority notifications (voicemail, SMS, etc) pushed at me more aggressively. Ideally show them on the lock screen like WebOS does so you don't have to unlock the device and goto the notification tray to check manually. There's also the problem of third party apps using the notification tray for SPAM which I do not care for one bit.

HTC Sense shows missed call & SMS notifications on the lock screen. I've found it to be an ideal notification experience, personally.

Spam is a problem best solved by removing the offending app. It's not like they can't do worse things to your phone (unless you're one of the few who pay attention to that permissions screen).

I would prefer to get the higher priority notifications (voicemail, SMS, etc) pushed at me more aggressively.

Your example "higher priority" notifications are two that I care the least about. I rarely use my phone for actually talking to people, and I don't listen to voicemail, so those I don't care about. I do care that I missed a call however -- who it was that called is much more important than the message they left.

I also get so many text messages, they need to be ranked in importance by who sent it, not that it's a text message. But setting up priorities based on sender is a lot of work, so I wouldn't do it. Maybe if it worked like gmail's priority inbox.

I see this and I think, "notifications aren't a Very Difficult Problem; DNA sequencing is a Very Difficult Problem." Living in the echo chamber can be fun, but the way we can lose perspective is incredible.

Ben does a great job of simplifying a host of issues down to just two, but in the end, he seems to end up blaming the user rather than the system for the problems in notification systems (though he does say that the systems aren't as good as people at notifications, which is true to an extent).

The biggest issue I had with the article (besides omitting the "come back to old notifications" problem plaguing some systems) was its overlooking of improvements. Innovation doesn't have to come overnight, and in the mean time, I'd love to have a better system than currently implemented. Even still, there are systems out there that get pretty close to his nirvana. Mobile Notifier for iOS (http://www.flickr.com/photos/piair/5492412910/in/photostream...) still covers up some of the screen (forcing you to take action to access that area of the screen), but it also lets you dismiss a notification with a quick swipe and quickly access all pending notifications.

The biggest praise I can give for the article is it's identification of people as a problem. It's true, we likely want to know more details about more events than in the past. It seems pretty needless all things considered, but why should a system be terrible at meeting our needs? We create the systems to change with our wants, after all.

I'm curious what flaws he sees with the WebOS notification system. It's hands-down the most elegant notifications I've seen on any platform.

Initial notifications are minimally intrusive (similar to Growl on OS X). From there, they can be trivially dismissed or minimized and left for later. This makes triaging incredibly easy and lightweight.

On my Pre, I'll often set alarms on my to-dos and then use them as kind of an on-demand dashboard of my daily tasks. As something gets finished, the notification gets dismissed with a flick of the thumb.

On WebOS, notifications actively make me happy. In comparison, Android is kind of clunky and the iPhone is horribly broken.

maybe this can be of some help one day:

http://talkingpengwin.com/re-design-of-the-ios-notification-...

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