Slack Manages the Attention of 12 Mil Daily Users via Notifications

courier.com

3 points·serverlessmom··3 comments

Nice to read that they have a dedicated team for notifications for 5 years running.

Too bad it's one of the crappiest notification experiences I've ever had. They either ping too much, or they don't ping at all. Settings are extremely limited.

Like, IRC clients could get this right 30 years ago.

Having recently moved to MacOS too (my first time, having used GNU/Linux since late 90s), combining that with one-direction notifications makes it even worse (basically, Slack will shoot notifications for a bunch of messages, but actually getting into Slack and reading those messages does not kill off the notifications so you have to hunt for those "Clear all" disappearing buttons: whoever said Macs have good UI?).

I'm a Windows user currently and your experience with Slacks notifications sound really irritating :/. One of the things that is mentioned in the article is that the average user expects that notifications will run the way they want "out of the box" and that they aren't willing to fiddle with settings. The article even says that... "Less than 5% of slacks users customize their notification settings". Do you feel like the settings are so limited that this is contributing to users not bothering to even try? Like maybe there's a lot of people who have checked the settings and then realized that they were going to get the results they wanted by fiddling with them?

There is a lot more thought and psychology that goes into notifications than we give them credit for while they are also irritating us to no end. On the other hand I have felt distinctly furious when notifications for my messaging apps fail and I find myself missing messages.

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