Notifications are Evil
informationdiet.com
informationdiet.com
It's a fundamental rule of human computer interaction—the user should be in control of the relationship, not the computer.
If we spoke to people the way computers speak to us, we'd be considered rude beyond belief. Whether it's our operating systems or web sites, they're constantly haranguing us to stop what we're doing and pay attention to them.
Let me be clear. There is NOTHING a computer needs your attention for that can't either be handled on its own or that can't wait until you're ready to pay attention to it.
If you're interested in being notified about an event, whether it's a new message coming in, a process completing, or an error that's happened in the background, you should be able to have that notification appear when the event occurs. But that should be your choice.
The distinction between "important" and "unimportant" notifications should be made by the user, not the machine.
Brilliantly put. Summed up a fair bit of my post nicely and more concisely, haha.
That talk is from 2009, so it's focusing mostly on desktop WIMP interfaces. I'm working on a design an OS/UI for touch surfaces.
I think hardware failures are probably the only class of notifications I'd want to be told of immediately. I had a HD start to go bad that was in a striped RAID array, I suspect it's been in that state for awhile and only learned of it when the RAID firmware had red in it when I restarted the PC and happened to be sitting there. I don't know why Windows never complained (I've seen "HD is bad" notification messages before in XP, but not this time - maybe the RAID controller abstracted the failure away?).
Similarly, I would also like to know if there were critical thermal problems in my laptop.
In the case of imminent hardware damage or data loss, I'd like to know.
Typically, it will. You need the RAID card manufacturer's software to talk to the card to find out when a disk is going bad.
No, you're not. Yes, notifications should be configurable and easy to turn off, but there's nothing that forces you to react to them. You can simply ignore them. It's a little red square in the corner, not a popup.
The author is blowing the issue completely out of proportions, in my opinion. Not to mention the completely ridiculous title. No, notifications aren't "evil". They're a tool, and an extremely useful one when you need it: if my laptop is about to run out of energy, you can bet I want a big in-my-face notification.
What's annoying (not "evil") is the lack of configurability of many systems, particularly websites/webapps. But that's an old discussion, and many people will argue for its benefits too.
These notifications are not meaningful requests for your immediate attention, they're things designed to get you to lose half your day to the service that created them. That's evil.
No one understands human behavior and motivation, conscious or otherwise, better than advertisers. Google and Facebook are the new advertisers, and thanks to the internet they now have better data than ever on how people respond to what's put in front of them.
I can send an email to you asking for information, and then push it from my mind until I get a notification saying that you've responded. Without notifications I'd have to go and check repeatedly to find out if you'd got back to me yet.
The important thing is to keep important notifications and unimportant ones separate, so that you're only notified of things you actually care about.
Sometimes, a person doesn't want any notifications at all—for example, when they're working and "in the zone," or watching a movie, or playing a game.
Sometimes, you want to be notified about pretty much everything.
The decision about when to be notified or not, and what's important vs. unimportant, should be your decision, not your computer's.
But isn't that the status quo?
I can't think of any piece of software I use that doesn't give me a fairly easy way to temporarily turn off the notifications. I don't want to get notified by Facebook? No problem, I shut it down. Don't want to be interrupted by my telephone? I put it in silent mode. Etc., etc.
The OSX dock bounces when an application thinks it has something important to tell you. Windows grab focus away from the user when a process completes. MS Outlook throws email notifications up at you, even when you're presenting to an audience on a large screen—always fun to see the subject lines of emails showing up while a presenter is trying to talk.
On your iPhone, you are forced to dig into the preferences to find and turn off the "Automatically ask to join networks" option if you don't want wi-fi notifications popping up all over the place any time you are on the move.
Off should be the default for notifications, not on.
Maybe I'm biased, though; exploring the Settings/Options is usually the first thing I do when I run a new application.
But damn if it doesn't grab the focus of my screen while it's there. There are a lot of times I'm looking at a piece of paper while typing an email or report, not looking at the screen. If I've gotten a new email since I started typing, everything I typed in the meantime has been triggering shortcuts on the email notification. Some of them have been deleted because I was typing when it popped up, some people have gotten part of my typing as an email response.
Lack of attention on my part? Sure. Lack of foresight on Novell's part? You bet your ass.
But notifications in moderation are fantastic.
But, when I'm on call, I know that if anything is important enough that I have to respond to it RIGHT NOW, I'll get paged. And that lets me completely forget about checking any other form of electronic communication until I feel like it -- which, on the weekend, can be a day or more.
So I'm sorry, but I'm not convinced by this article. On the contrary, I find notifications to be one of the best UI solutions out there. They are completely noninvasive[2] and make sure you don't miss anything, so you don't have to constantly check what is going on. It boils down to what alexchamberlain said in the thread - event-based architecture beats polling in almost all cases.
[1] - if we can call anything on Facebook "important". But things like comments to my updates, or activities of my closest friends are things I don't want to miss.
[2] - Twitter, G+ and Facebook notifications are generally numbers on the webpage title / notification bar. They do not play sounds, they do not pop windows up. If one gets distracted by that, I recommend not keeping FB/Twitter/G+ tabs open in the browser during work.
Salespeople need marketers to sell products, marketers rely on Facebook and Google to buy targeted advertising slots, who in turn optimize their social networking tools to encourage everyone to share even more, all the time.
Frictionless sharing, as Zuck puts it, because the more you share, the more keywords they can accumulate and sell as ad slots to marketers and sales people.
For the rest of us, we have our work to do and there's only a small window of our day when we're most productive.
Understand that the social web, as we know it, isn't designed in a way optimized for our productivity and happiness. It serves the tripartite of salespeople, marketers and social networking companies.
Sure it's free to use, but if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
I've since weaned myself from Facebook for more than a year with a little tool I made that helps me, my wife, family, friends and colleagues be more selective about what they share in a attention-respectful and considerate pace.
It's called Handpick, which helps you collect links for different groups of people and send a single email digest daily or weekly, totally cutting out pesky notifications in our lives.
Let me know what you think.
Bundling all the links into a daily or weekly email digest would be less disruptive than sharing via facebook, imo.
I don't have issue with notifications that wait for me to review them but I do absolutely abhor notifications that think I exist to serve them.
This is fundamentally about respect. It's my currency and respect for others and their time is something I do my best to abide by.
When an app doesn't respect me, or my time, and interrupts me, it's indirectly saying it's more important than anything I'm working on. It might not mean to, but it's like someone showing up at your desk demanding attention for their question without any regard for what you're working on.
Example: I just switched to a Galaxy Android phone from an older iOS phone. This isn't Android's fault, I'm sure I'll find it elsewhere too.
My punishment for adding my accounts to a modern mobile OS? My notification center blinks like a Christmas tree.
I am a person that barely tolerates SMS or voicemail notifications. No problem is rarely that big that it can't wait an hour. Or two. Being the path of least resistance and being available to the whims of others simply leaves you drowned in more information than is humane. It's better to reward people who make requests as far in advance as possible, and reward them with those quickest, preferred emails.
I run a consulting business that primarily develops products. I am, by the way of having good systems and processes, able to work with this rule. I can reply to emails every few hours. Emergencies, still get dealt with as emergencies. Just put a Priority 1 in the subject of the email, or call the emergency voicemail, and it's a fire drill, with the minimum hour(s) we agree to every fire drill.
I don't care to receive a notification that a new meetup has been created. I don't care I received an instant message right this second. I wish Gtalk would stop harassing me for signing in with. I'm scared to hook up my other IM accounts.
I don't care what a single app has to tell me right this instant. Sorry, but it won't improve there quality of my life this instant, or the next 5 years. It's just noise, 99% of the time.
If it's a new attention economy, I'm not going to let others decide the rules of how I spend my most valuable currency -- my attention so easily. When I did, it robbed me of focus, productivity and momentum, and let others set the priorities in my life. Theres no imagining how users who aren't aware of how they're being distracted and overwhelmed might overcome this.
I personally feel that part of this is the fault of the Blackberry culture that I watched in total horror: Blackberries made people feel like they were being more productive.
The too oft reality? blackberries are great for the people asking the questions. For the overwhelming majority that answer the questions for a living, they are now busy doing other peoples work. They are busy dealing with the poor planning of others now disguised as an emergency.
Only one thing. Poor planning on your part doesn't make am emergency on my part. I now have to deal with this culture of interruption, packaged as notifications but it's just really lazy. It's not a new economy, it's not a new world. It's someone wanting to micromanage my time that doesn't understand my time. Thanks, but no thanks.
Sorry apps, but you aren't the center of my life, just because I installed you. You're not that important. I'm not that important, but I value my time and like feeling good about what I accomplish every day.
If I need your notifications I can turn them on. Otherwise, quit being an attention seeker. I find it pretty disrespectful that you think I exist to serve you, app; it's the other way around.
Instead of improving the signal to noise ratio in my life you are polluting my life with more nose.
What have I spent the last 3 days doing? Learning to turn off every single notification and only find apps where I can control them.
I'm speaking to where the assumption that notifications should be on by default is coming from and how selfish it is on the part of the developers.
Anything I love I want it to occupy my true attention. I'm at the point where I wish I could filter only certain email addresses, SMS' and phone calls to ring, and let the rest fall to a central policy...
Do you know of anything that does this? It's on my list of researching as I'm making the switch.
What makes you think it's the developers in this case being selfish and not you? The numbers might be on either side, or on nobody's side depending on how the problem gets framed.
I may not be thinking about this correctly, but some assumption has to be made:
(1) Notifications on by default. (2) Notifications off by default.
Either (1) or (2) can of course be presented to the user as being the default case and the user can be made aware that the default can be modified. Which seems optimal, until you remember that default choices developers make about notifications are not the only choices they make regarding defaults. Lots... most settings are given default states.
So then it's a question of which settings are explicitly presented to the user as having defaults and being modifiable. Are they all important enough? Of course not. Are notifications? Maybe.
But if notifications are important enough, then it's very likely that others will be important enough as well. And this means that upon installing a program, the user is in for a real choice making treat.
Most users are simply not capable of reasoning about such choices. And if they are capable, then they'll likely either know how to find and change the setting or know how to find out how to find and change the setting.
In all other cases, it only makes sense to make assumptions about what users want when they probably don't know what they want, or can't really reason about the situation due to lack of language-tools or context or background or whatever.
The most irresponsible and selfish thing for developers to do to such users is say, "Here are a bunch of choices. Figure it out yourself." Most can't figure it out themselves, would make the wrong choices with regard to themselves, and would be less happy for it. Developers can sometimes make horrible and damaging assumptions about users, yes, but I don't think this is one of those times.
In the case of notifications, most people I know want to be notified 9 times out of 10 about facebook mentions, google+ circle adds, SMS, etc. etc. Mostly these people love the interactions, it's why they have smartphones in the first place. Call it vanity, vacuous egotism or what have you. I am very, very suspicious of it myself.
(There is an excellent philosophical discussion to be had about the responsibility one has for ones own attention and the attention one demands of others -- and that discussion would probably end in a denunciation of all things notification-like, but I'm setting that discussion aside here for a pragmatic one instead.)
But the fact remains developers are probably making the right choice and assumptions about the default-is-on state of notifications when it comes to most users. Now, I understand you do not like the notifications. In that, you are not alone. My guess is that the set of people who despise notifications is probably not too divergent with the set of people who know how to turn them off. Granted, I've got no data on that. And maybe somebody else does (it would be a very interesting data to reason about!).
So all this is to ask about the question of responsibility on the part of the developers. And at the bottom of my reasoning here is the idea that (1) developers must make assumptions about defaults, because (2) users can't in most cases be trusted to make those assumptions themselves, and (3) if assumptions must be made they better be made with the majority in mind.
http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/the-information-die...
iOS has had in it the form of "This application would like to use notification", the first time you start an app, for ages. Maybe it's one of the things I'm very visibly noticing in switching to Android.
It's not a complicated setting.
"Do you want to be notified when there's an update to be had?" The first time the app runs. It's when the attention to that app is the highest, we've just picked it and installed it and want to try it.
It could be a system wide setting; that filters down into all mobile apps, or just be unchecked, or you decide not to.
If notifications are on by default, it's often selfish motive in the design to get higher uptake and stickiness of the app. We all know that most apps overwhelmingly are rarely used after installation despite the notifications defaulting to be on.
I was also, specifically, speaking about apps with notifications, on mobile devices. If you wish to extend that generally to software in general that's fine, fair and your decision, but it's not what I'm speaking to.
Its entirely pragmatic to be able to have a say in how your focus, productivity and attention is interrupted. It's not philosophical. I like getting stuff done, and separating the signal from the noise of what to pay attention to is integral to that.
Most users have enough of an issue handling the information overload they're facing. Instead of technology being an empowering tool it's become quite the opposite when they're not given good examples of not proactively being to make one basic decision, "should I bother you".
Apps need to make notifications smart by first adding options for what kind and how often they pop up. Facebook appeased me some time ago but now is back to annoying me. I used to get emails for every little thing that happened on Facebook then I was allowed to set it so I got one consolidated email every so often. Great. Now they end up buzzing my phone with every little comment or Like. That's annoying. If they could let me set it so that I was notified once per post of comments or maybe one notification after X number of actions that would normally trigger a notification that would be awesome but having my pocket buzz every two seconds sucks.
My girlfriend once commented on everything she could on my wall for more than 20 minutes and my phone was literally buzzing the entire time. I had to call to tell her to quit commenting. She burst out laughing because she knew all the notifications would annoy me. It was a super frustrating joke.
As someone who isn't very social to begin with, an overload of notifications can actually be overwhelming and make me less engaged instead of more engaged. Smart use of notifications gets me using your service. Buffer does this right. I get, at most, 2 notifications if I have an empty buffer and it gets me adding more. Mint gives me 2 notifications a week: one if a bank account goes over or under a certain threshold and another with a summary of my finances at the end of the week. That's great. Twitter, Facebook, Livingsocial, Groupon.. They're all annoying.
I guess the point is that "dumb" notifications are like getting a cold call from someone who hasn't done research about you, tries to sell you something you wouldn't ever want and mispronounces your name on top of it. Smart notifications are like good friends that call you up every so often just to see how you're doing and to see if maybe you want to make plans for later.
Maybe it could work by giving these services like Facebook an email address like you@SmartNotifications.com and then they filter them and send them to your real inbox in a smart way. And for SMS maybe use something like Twilio or AmazonSNS and give the Facebook type app a unique number that directs all notifications to the SmartNotifications app then it filters them for you and forwards them in a smart way to your mobile device. Now, for app notifications I'm not sure how that would work as I can't think of a way for a third party to intercept that type of thing so maybe you'd just have to turn notifications off on your phone and rely on SmartNotification email and SMS alerts.
But the article makes a good point about all these websites having a vested interest in annoying you. Surely google and Facebook could implement this and I find it hard to believe that they haven't done it because they just haven't gotten around to it. It would make sense that they would want to avoid this feature so that kind of rules out hoping to build this sort of thing and selling it to them. We're left with circumventing the system and doing it without their approval potentially making anyone who does this an enemy to web apps and a friend to the users. Unfortunately the apps will probably have more power and make it difficult to operate. But we can all still dream.
Personally, I think the pendulum will eventually swing back as users get tired and frustrated with all these services vying for their attention.
On the whole though I'm finding Android to be an interesting environment where I can hopefully get more things running how I would like.
Conversely, I work in a (non-startup) environment where problems usually can't wait an hour or two. I need to know when things come in to get my job done.
What I love about Android's notification system is that if something isn't critical right this moment, I can just ignore it. CM7 and ICS both allow you to dismiss individual notifications, making this even easier.
On the same note, I've never understood how people could stand iOS' SMS notifications; it just plain breaks the basic rule of not stealing focus from what the user is doing. Irritates me to no end.
In iOS5 there's a notification bar (similar to Android, from what I've heard). You can set SMS messages to only appear there.
It provides a welcome level of control, but I found the whole notification UI initially confusing. I found it difficult to match my mental model of an app's notification to the right settings to flip in the UI.
Yes, it's lifted almost directly from Android. I wasn't aware that they'd offered the option to disable the annoying SMS pop up, though.
>I found it difficult to match my mental model of an app's notification to the right settings to flip in the UI.
On Android, notification options are in the settings menu for each app.
If the role is primarily support this might not apply as much.
I consult in a lot of non-startup environments.
People rarely can wait an hour or two. Hell, they can't even wait 10 minutes. They over trivialize matters, wave their hands at developers to go away and fix it right away.
Building the process to teach them to prioritize those things that "can't wait" -- teaches them to understand everything isn't a priority and can't be. Resources, time, and attention are limited and ultimately you have to pick what to do first.
Each request is fundamentally different. Each request does not need immediate processing, or there is likely something that is reactive that should be pro-active.
I've worked in the IT food chain from the front lines, to hardware, software, networking, sales, management, architecture. It really comes down to a culture of reactiveness vs. proactiveness.
What do I do? We use a case manager heavily, with different priorities meaning different response times. There's no room for misinterpretation. An emergency is a fire alarm. Urgent client impacting issues need to be resolved under 24-48 hours, if not the same business day. But, every request does not get looked at immediately. I've handled hundreds of thousands of cases in 15 years of getting requests.
Immediate action doesn't meant constant interruption. Raging fires of an emergency should get our attention. If other requests rae coming into a queue we're already working on, we don't need to see more, we just keep working through the queue in the order we need.
On a side note, I can't wait for ICS letting me dismiss individual notifications, long over due. Also, I hope I can turn off the audio notifications that are happening in Gingerbread even though I turn off all notifications in the apps.
Failing that I think you can set the notification ringtone to "Silent".
But yes, I obsessively need to help people by responding to those notifications, so I can understand the struggle.
The only time I get a notification is when I receive an email (assuming I have a terminal running mutt for that address) or a PM/IM (assuming I have a terminal running irssi). And the notification? The color of a 30x10 pixel block changes from black to red.
I can turn off this notification on a service-by-service basis with a simple hotkey that disables the visual bell in my terminal.
That's it! No growl-like service telling me when anything happens anywhere in the world. No badged icons reminding me I still have 17 unread items. If I want to be distracted, I switch desktops to see what alerted me; if I don't, I can ignore that one for hours.
I've relentlessly turned off all notifications from any app. Goes the same for email as well. I'll only check for updates when I feel I need to. Going so far as deleting Twitter and Facebook apps. Foodspotting, Yelp, Path etc etc, notifications are all off. I value my time ferociously and snuff out anything that comes between me and focusing on the important.
example. on my webserver at work i setup simple php page with JSON output: { monitor_param: 1 } when everything OK, or { monitor_param: 0 } when there is an issue. then i go online and setup custom alert that can reach my php script every couple minutes/seconds and check the status. IF monitor_param == 0 then push an alert on my mobile dev screen.
can see multitude of places you could use it!
2. Get some self control. My phone beeps at me all the time and I'll go 45 minutes without even considering looking at it.
This seems like the epitome of a first world problem. "My phone notifies me when something is happening and I just can't help getting distracted by it".