The Gong Show: Push Notification Overload
Push notifications on iPhone are a total mess. The signal-to-noise ratio when my phone buzzes is quite poor these days.
Apple is doing the classic bad design cop-out move: give the user explicit, fine-grained permissioning and then dust their hands of the problem. I have 27 different apps I can…
At this point there’s a decent comment thread on the original post, but I still want to get my thoughts in. I agree that the current iOS notification system could be much better. The most obvious thing is to change the UX from modal dialogs (that are dismissed and never seen again) to some sort of non-modal notification log that can be recalled when the user is ready to check what he/she has missed.
But I don’t think using machine learning to determine which notifications are important is a good idea. You’d need a certain amount of training data for that user before the machine learning could/should kick in, which is fine. But an incorrect decision (based on machine learning) to hide notifications would result in hiding a valuable notification from the user; that’s the worst thing you could do.
Furthermore, machine learning can’t take a user’s context into account when making a decision about whether to show a notification. What if a user dismisses a notification that he/she would normally care about because he/she is in a meeting? What if there’s nothing more to view because the notification doesn’t warrant further action? The notification is important, but the user will dismiss it.
I think it’s right to leave these decisions in the hands of the user. If the UX were better, it wouldn’t be such a mess in the first place.
Source: thegongshow
