7 ms·

Notifications are Evil

121 points by cjoh 15y ago

AndrewDucker 15y ago
I completely disagree. Notifications are awesome because I can forget about the event until it occurs. 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.
- jaysonelliot 15y ago
  Yes, and that should be your choice, not the system's choice. If you decide that some notifications are important enough to be displayed, then you should see them. 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.
  - michael_dorfman 15y ago
    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.
    - cjoh 15y ago
      Google+ notifications on the search page.
      - TeMPOraL 15y ago
        Almost invisible. I notice them only when I'm not focused and start looking around for distractions. I'm a bit angry at that, because a notification that you notice several days after the event it refers to is usually worthless.
    - jaysonelliot 15y ago
      Both MacOS and Windows. 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.
      - icebraining 15y ago
        Frankly, is the default that important? Change it once and it's off. Even if you do that for 40 applications, it's still a very small amount of time in total. Maybe I'm biased, though; exploring the Settings/Options is usually the first thing I do when I run a new application.
        jaysonelliot 15y ago
        I think you're mistaking "what an advanced user can put up with" for what the best experience should be.
      - freehunter 15y ago
        My god this is so frustrating. I work in information security, and there are a lot of events I need to know about the very minute they happen. So I have my email client notify me in the only way it knows how: popup notifications. Now these on their own are fine, I love them. I can glance at the subject and the sender and know if I need to respond. If I'm busy, it disappears after a few seconds. 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.
- untog 15y ago
  I think the issue here is defaults. When I install Foursquare it started pushing notifications to me every time a contact checked in somewhere- seemingly anywhere within the New York metro area. Absolutely pointless. But notifications in moderation are fantastic.
- mithaler 15y ago
  In that sense, notifications are actually a good deal better than phone calls, which demand immediate attention (or frustrate the caller by making them think "you never pick up the phone!").
- svdad 15y ago
  That is actually the one reason I like carrying a pager. I still dislike it for enough other reasons that I would give it up in a second. 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.
alexchamberlain 15y ago
This is a qualitative comparison of polling verses an event based design. We all know that event based systems are harder to design, but use far less resources.
jaysonelliot 15y ago
The author is absolutely right. 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.
- j45 15y ago
  "It's a fundamental rule of human computer interaction—the user should be in control of the relationship, not the computer." Brilliantly put. Summed up a fair bit of my post nicely and more concisely, haha.
  - jaysonelliot 15y ago
    This is something of an obsession of mine. If you're interested, here's a talk I give about where we need to go next in UI design: http://www.bilconference.com/videos/rethinking-modern-gui-jayson-elliot/ http://www.bilconference.com/videos/rethinking-modern-gui-ja... 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.
- Splines 15y ago
  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. 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.
j45 15y ago
Interruptions are the enemy of productivity. 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.
TeMPOraL 15y ago
I think it's nowhere near as bad as the article sounds. The red square from Google+ is small and hidden in the place I usually don't even look, so I find myself not realizing for days that got a notification from Google+. On Facebook, notifications are one of the most useful features of the whole service - they tell me about the more important[1] events that I could otherwise miss (Facebook walls are heavily filtered; otherwise you'd be flooded by updates). And they don't even appear on your e-mail, unless I ask for it (Facebook has now disabled almost all e-mail notifications by default). 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.
- wavephorm 15y ago
  But on Google Plus, you can't easily make that red square go away. You can't just right click "clear". You can't even open it open and click "clear". It forces you to go down the list and manually click on each action, before it makes it go away. It's extraordinarily annoying.
  - commandar 15y ago
    You can click on the notifier and then click away. It won't clear out the notifications, but it will mark them as read and unhighlight them.
drivebyacct2 15y ago
1. Turn them off. Mute your phone, use one of half a dozen ways in Android to mute/hide/ignore notifications. Install a Greasemonkey script to hide the G+ notification count. 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".
- glhaynes 15y ago
  I agree — yet at the same time we have to recognize that most people (maybe all people, from time to time?) have trouble with this, so it's perhaps an opportunity for designers to help regardless of whether they "should" have to or not.
joering2 15y ago
question: is there an app/would there be a market for an app that i can download it to my phone and then go online and setup custom alerts when a notification should popup on my mobile dev screen? 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!
- dpritchett 15y ago
  Might be easier to use an sms api like twilio to alert you when the monitoring api shows a notable event. barring that there are mobile notification brokers out there, I think urban airship is one.
icebraining 15y ago
If we don't control the notifications we're receiving, we're forced to react to them 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.
- shoover 15y ago
  If you control your reactions to these things, you have a stronger will than me. This interpretation from the OP lines up better with my observations of myself and everyone I know who gets text messages, Facebook notifications, email notifications, or a red box at the top of a white page: 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.
- drcube 15y ago
  "Ignore" is a reaction. Notifications are a distraction whether you ignore them or not.
  - pestaa 15y ago
    So right. Not deciding what to do is deciding to do nothing in my book.
EGreg 15y ago
This is why in our platform we let you manage your subscriptions and notifications to every stream :)
freshlog 15y ago
To understand why the social web is so noisy, simply follow the money. 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. http://handpick.me http://handpick.me Let me know what you think.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Cool idea, is it opt-in for the receiver though? Otherwise it sounds like another unwanted notification.
  - freshlog 15y ago
    Well, your recipients should be friends, family or colleagues you care about, so you'd be sharing very specific things that you know they will like. Bundling all the links into a daily or weekly email digest would be less disruptive than sharing via facebook, imo.
njharman 15y ago
Interruptions are evil. I'm lucky (I guess) in being oblivious and able to tune stuff out (as long as it doesn't make sound, steal focus). I didn't notice that g+ red box or knew what it meant for awhile. I used reddit for months before someone told me I had "replies" and I asked what he meant and he said the orange letter icon, means someone has replied to you. I said "oh", and carried on with whatever I was doing. Which brings me to the point of my comment. Not being distracted is a self-discipline. By letting yourself be distracted you are as much to blame as notifications.
michaelfeathers 15y ago
Everything that gives you notifications should give you the option to get them in digest form :-)
jsz0 15y ago
Isn't this really more about OCD-ish behaviors than notifications? There's no good reason you have to act on every notification you receive unless you want to. In most cases you have a choice to even receive the notifications in the first place. Notifications are great if they are used responsibility. To me this is just part of a bigger trend where it seems to be socially acceptable to use technology as an excuse to justify bad behaviors.
- sukuriant 15y ago
  Possible, though personally, I have to turn off sounds to my instant messages; and, if I'm anywhere near my up-turned phone, just the sight of a blinking message is enough to completely derail me. My response? no sounds on IMs, minimal flashing if I can control it (sometimes even just having the window go into the not-flash,-but-constant-on mode when it gets a message); and, for my phone, flipping it over so I can't see the notification blinker. But yes, I obsessively need to help people by responding to those notifications, so I can understand the struggle.
will_lam 15y ago
Really timely. Thanks to cjoh for posting this as it chimes in with what I've been feeling recently. 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.
tdavis 15y ago
One of the many things I love about using next to no GUI programs and a minimalist window manager is the lack of notifications. 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.
unfletch 15y ago
"Evil" ain't what it used to be.
bergie 15y ago
This is something that GNOME3 does right: if you set yourself as "busy", then you won't be bothered by notifications.

121 points by cjoh 15y ago

I completely disagree. Notifications are awesome because I can forget about the event until it occurs. 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.

jaysonelliot 15y ago
Yes, and that should be your choice, not the system's choice. If you decide that some notifications are important enough to be displayed, then you should see them. 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.
- michael_dorfman 15y ago
  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.
  - cjoh 15y ago
    Google+ notifications on the search page.
    - TeMPOraL 15y ago
      Almost invisible. I notice them only when I'm not focused and start looking around for distractions. I'm a bit angry at that, because a notification that you notice several days after the event it refers to is usually worthless.
  - jaysonelliot 15y ago
    Both MacOS and Windows. 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.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      Frankly, is the default that important? Change it once and it's off. Even if you do that for 40 applications, it's still a very small amount of time in total. Maybe I'm biased, though; exploring the Settings/Options is usually the first thing I do when I run a new application.
      - jaysonelliot 15y ago
        I think you're mistaking "what an advanced user can put up with" for what the best experience should be.
    - freehunter 15y ago
      My god this is so frustrating. I work in information security, and there are a lot of events I need to know about the very minute they happen. So I have my email client notify me in the only way it knows how: popup notifications. Now these on their own are fine, I love them. I can glance at the subject and the sender and know if I need to respond. If I'm busy, it disappears after a few seconds. 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.
untog 15y ago
I think the issue here is defaults. When I install Foursquare it started pushing notifications to me every time a contact checked in somewhere- seemingly anywhere within the New York metro area. Absolutely pointless. But notifications in moderation are fantastic.
mithaler 15y ago
In that sense, notifications are actually a good deal better than phone calls, which demand immediate attention (or frustrate the caller by making them think "you never pick up the phone!").
svdad 15y ago
That is actually the one reason I like carrying a pager. I still dislike it for enough other reasons that I would give it up in a second. 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.

alexchamberlain 15y ago

This is a qualitative comparison of polling verses an event based design. We all know that event based systems are harder to design, but use far less resources.

jaysonelliot 15y ago

The author is absolutely right. 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.

j45 15y ago
"It's a fundamental rule of human computer interaction—the user should be in control of the relationship, not the computer." Brilliantly put. Summed up a fair bit of my post nicely and more concisely, haha.
- jaysonelliot 15y ago
  This is something of an obsession of mine. If you're interested, here's a talk I give about where we need to go next in UI design: http://www.bilconference.com/videos/rethinking-modern-gui-jayson-elliot/ http://www.bilconference.com/videos/rethinking-modern-gui-ja... 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.
Splines 15y ago
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. 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.

j45 15y ago

Interruptions are the enemy of productivity. 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.

TeMPOraL 15y ago

I think it's nowhere near as bad as the article sounds. The red square from Google+ is small and hidden in the place I usually don't even look, so I find myself not realizing for days that got a notification from Google+. On Facebook, notifications are one of the most useful features of the whole service - they tell me about the more important[1] events that I could otherwise miss (Facebook walls are heavily filtered; otherwise you'd be flooded by updates). And they don't even appear on your e-mail, unless I ask for it (Facebook has now disabled almost all e-mail notifications by default). 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.

wavephorm 15y ago
But on Google Plus, you can't easily make that red square go away. You can't just right click "clear". You can't even open it open and click "clear". It forces you to go down the list and manually click on each action, before it makes it go away. It's extraordinarily annoying.
- commandar 15y ago
  You can click on the notifier and then click away. It won't clear out the notifications, but it will mark them as read and unhighlight them.

drivebyacct2 15y ago

1. Turn them off. Mute your phone, use one of half a dozen ways in Android to mute/hide/ignore notifications. Install a Greasemonkey script to hide the G+ notification count. 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".

glhaynes 15y ago
I agree — yet at the same time we have to recognize that most people (maybe all people, from time to time?) have trouble with this, so it's perhaps an opportunity for designers to help regardless of whether they "should" have to or not.

joering2 15y ago

question: is there an app/would there be a market for an app that i can download it to my phone and then go online and setup custom alerts when a notification should popup on my mobile dev screen? 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!

dpritchett 15y ago
Might be easier to use an sms api like twilio to alert you when the monitoring api shows a notable event. barring that there are mobile notification brokers out there, I think urban airship is one.

icebraining 15y ago

If we don't control the notifications we're receiving, we're forced to react to them 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.

shoover 15y ago
If you control your reactions to these things, you have a stronger will than me. This interpretation from the OP lines up better with my observations of myself and everyone I know who gets text messages, Facebook notifications, email notifications, or a red box at the top of a white page: 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.
drcube 15y ago
"Ignore" is a reaction. Notifications are a distraction whether you ignore them or not.
- pestaa 15y ago
  So right. Not deciding what to do is deciding to do nothing in my book.

EGreg 15y ago

This is why in our platform we let you manage your subscriptions and notifications to every stream :)

freshlog 15y ago

To understand why the social web is so noisy, simply follow the money. 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. http://handpick.me http://handpick.me Let me know what you think.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Cool idea, is it opt-in for the receiver though? Otherwise it sounds like another unwanted notification.
- freshlog 15y ago
  Well, your recipients should be friends, family or colleagues you care about, so you'd be sharing very specific things that you know they will like. Bundling all the links into a daily or weekly email digest would be less disruptive than sharing via facebook, imo.

njharman 15y ago

Interruptions are evil. I'm lucky (I guess) in being oblivious and able to tune stuff out (as long as it doesn't make sound, steal focus). I didn't notice that g+ red box or knew what it meant for awhile. I used reddit for months before someone told me I had "replies" and I asked what he meant and he said the orange letter icon, means someone has replied to you. I said "oh", and carried on with whatever I was doing. Which brings me to the point of my comment. Not being distracted is a self-discipline. By letting yourself be distracted you are as much to blame as notifications.

michaelfeathers 15y ago

Everything that gives you notifications should give you the option to get them in digest form :-)

jsz0 15y ago

Isn't this really more about OCD-ish behaviors than notifications? There's no good reason you have to act on every notification you receive unless you want to. In most cases you have a choice to even receive the notifications in the first place. Notifications are great if they are used responsibility. To me this is just part of a bigger trend where it seems to be socially acceptable to use technology as an excuse to justify bad behaviors.

sukuriant 15y ago
Possible, though personally, I have to turn off sounds to my instant messages; and, if I'm anywhere near my up-turned phone, just the sight of a blinking message is enough to completely derail me. My response? no sounds on IMs, minimal flashing if I can control it (sometimes even just having the window go into the not-flash,-but-constant-on mode when it gets a message); and, for my phone, flipping it over so I can't see the notification blinker. But yes, I obsessively need to help people by responding to those notifications, so I can understand the struggle.

will_lam 15y ago

Really timely. Thanks to cjoh for posting this as it chimes in with what I've been feeling recently. 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.

tdavis 15y ago

One of the many things I love about using next to no GUI programs and a minimalist window manager is the lack of notifications. 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.

unfletch 15y ago

"Evil" ain't what it used to be.

bergie 15y ago

This is something that GNOME3 does right: if you set yourself as "busy", then you won't be bothered by notifications.