8 ms·

Notifications are a UX Anti-Pattern

• greenyoda 13y ago
  "email allows anyone to interrupt you, at any time, for any reason" Only if you let them! Every e-mail system that I know of allows you to turn off incoming mail notifications: you can get rid of the infernal beep, the annoying pop-up message and even the little envelope icon. A good e-mail system also allows you to automatically filter out unimportant messages (like stuff sent to corporate mailing lists) so that the unimportant mail doesn't even get to your primary in-box. I look at my e-mail when I'm moving between tasks (e.g., finished writing some piece of code). Many messages are not as urgent as they seem, and can easily wait for hours or even days to be answered. Many problems fix themselves if you wait for a couple of hours: people realize that they could have figured something out themselves instead of asking you, or they realize that their problem wasn't a really a problem ("oh, never mind"). If you answer your e-mail too quickly, you frequently end up doing unnecessary extra work that helps nobody. Of course in some jobs, like network operations, you really need to reply to messages quickly. But software developers can be much more productive if they ignore their e-mail and maintain their focus on their code.