A Common Sense Media report finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day. Some get nearly 5,000 in 24 hours. What does that do to their brains?
A Common Sense Media report finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day. Some get nearly 5,000 in 24 hours. What does that do to their brains?
It’s called notification/alert/alarm fatigue and results in desensitization, with users often ignoring notifications entirely. This is terrible, as you’re then likely to ignore critical or important messages, tasks, and dates that you actually do care about (the whole reason notifications exist to begin with).
I imagine some people go the opposite way and anxiously work through each and every notification, elevating stress and sapping hours, energy, and productivity from their lives.
A lot more work needs to be done on giving users complete fine-grained control over notifications and level of severity by app; helping them take control, easily report devs for abuse, and adjust prefs ad-hoc from the notification view to aggressively silence everything that’s exploiting the privilege.
Android does exactly this, I can go into any app and it’ll give me a breakdown of all the types of notification it sends. So like Instagram will have DMs, friends posts, “What’s new” etc. As separate notification types and I can go into each and determine if it’s super critical and should override even DnD all the way down to completely disabled. It even tells you the average notifications you get for each type.
It’s not perfect, it depends on the app dev for proper breakout of the types. I’ve seen some apps that dumps all notifications into the same channel, but all the major ones are pretty good about it.
I think it’s important for people to learn how to manage/customize notifications whether it be on the OS level or through each app individually.
I keep a lot of things as silent notifications, so they pop up but don’t grab my attention. They’ll be there when I look at my phone. I think texts/calls are the only thing that makes noise on my phone at all.