Push Notification Overload

Thursday, March 24, 2011

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 turn on or off in push notification settings and in each one I have 3 options to choose: badges, alerts and sounds. That’s nearly 100 different choices, and that doesn’t even include the custom in-app settings you can set, such as user-specific pings in 4SQ. The cognitive load on the end user to keep these settings in check is far too high.

The result is that when my phone buzzes, I no longer feel that it is urgent to check. I’d say the problem is comparable to the FB newsfeed spam in 2009, except more intrusive because its actively interrupting the user.

The solution is not finer-grained control (that would exacerbate the problem IMHO). I think the solution is a bottom-up machine learning approach which learns the pushes I care about most based on my responses, and then changes settings on my behalf.