Notifications While You Sleep

This is something I haven’t seen addressed anywhere and it’s something that’s come to bother me recently. There are a lot of development guides that address how to properly monetise, how to design a menu system, how to prod your users just right, and so and so. But I’ve seen nothing about how to manage your notification in a way that makes sense if you consider they are being ignored 6-8 hours a day.

I will discuss this using examples from some of mostly notifying apps:

First, The Failures:

  • GReader. It’s a bit of an oldie and isn’t maintained much but it’s still very useful. What it does is check for updates every X minutes, download updates and notify how many items there are now and how many are new. And it overrides previous notifications. So, I can’t see the total amount of new items since I last opened it. That’s annoying.
  • Twitch. Whenever someone you follow goes online, you get a notification. And any new notification overrides the previous one. This isn’t horrible when I’m awake because I can just open the app and see who’s online. But, when I sleep, trillions of notifications could go by, people I care about could have streamed or uploaded and then I’ll have to go and check manually to see if I missed something important.

Secondly, The Overdoer:

  • Discord. Whenever I have a new notification from Discord, it’s add to the bar. Not collapsed, not counting, just adding to the bar. So, after a busy night, I might have 8-10 notifications just from Discord. I don’t miss anything but it can be done better.

Thirdly, How it Should be Done:

  • Gmail. Not a big surprise that a Google app does it correctly. New notifications just get added to the original one. From one big new email alert, it turns into a list of new things, which can be swiped open or clicked to go to the app.
  • Business Calendar. But I would also like to mention the greatest calendar app on the market, which does it very similarly. New notifications get bunched up, I can swipe them open and then open them individually or open the pop up window to manage all of them.

So, please, please, someone learn from this.


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