Gadgets as a source of constant distractions

Every time when you think that lifestyle can no longer change faster, fate obligingly proves the opposite. Compare your life today with the one that was five years ago - everything became completely different, and one of the key differences can be called an overabundance of distracting events.

We constantly look through some messages: in SMS, social networks, e-mail, we read news, entertaining publications, etc. Many people are trying to tell us something, to convey. And with the ubiquitous spread of smart watches, the situation will only become more complicated: as the MG Siegler techno-blogger has noticed, “ this is a device for attracting attention, ” and if the smartphone can still be put away, the watch is always on hand, in sight.
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There are two ways to deal with an excess of all sorts of distracting events. The first is to explain, argue, prove to everyone in your social circle that the constant switching of attention is harmful to health (it is, it makes us stupid ), and then go to the country, away from everyone. And to find out that there is a good mobile Internet outside the city.

However, life and circumstances will still be stronger. One young acquaintance of the author of this article recently showed the result of one day she spent without a smartphone: WhatsApp had 2,000 messages. The girl is 12 years old.

None of our words and logical arguments can change the digital lifestyle of the younger generation. But for adults, the situation with constant information noise is not too different. Look at the email client application icon on your smartphone, how many unread messages are there? How many letters do you receive per day? Add here your feed on Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte, Instagram, WhatsApp, Viber and other services and get a huge number of cases that require distracting from current affairs, switching attention.

The only effective way to deal with this is to use the quality inherent in our biological species. Adapt. Make new tools. Do not fight with changes, but “ride” them.

So what to do?

A lot of research is devoted to the problem of the influence of distractions on a person, like adaptation strategies . But look at this question from the other side, from the point of view of responsibility. What we - the technical community, product experts, designers, developers, marketers - can do to ensure that we are not overwhelmed with all sorts of notifications?

This problem can be compared with the transition to environmentally friendly energy sources. One can idealize them as much as necessary, but the transition will occur only when the whole of this “ecology” becomes cheap or its harmlessness is very much in demand.

Maintaining the “purity” of our digital environment is just as difficult as it involves a lot of money. Many companies are trying to get your attention, to be louder than others, telling about themselves more often and more intrusive. "Please look at me, not at a competitor." "Buy my product, buy my content." In social networks it is still more difficult, since, theoretically, the networks themselves are not a source of distracting events, the users themselves do this.

You need to begin to solve the problem by setting up notifications in each component of your digital ecosystem, from the operating system to individual applications.

operating system

With Android and iOS, you can control most of the events that distract our attention. The tools available in the OS allow you to customize the types of notifications, the time they are received and the types of actions more efficiently and more purposefully. Here are some basic examples.

In iOS, the “Do Not Disturb” (Do Not Disturb) option is hidden in the depth of the settings menu, but it affects only some of the device’s capabilities. Therefore, as a better alternative, you could create a Time Out mode. The idea is that every person needs to periodically rest from all sorts of informational stimuli in order to be able to focus on one thing.

The “Break” mode is no less (and in fact much more) more important than “Airplane Mode”. It should be placed at the very top and, perhaps, made automatically activated when the user turns off the sound on the smartphone. Understand the name "Break" should be literally, that is, absolutely all events that can distract the owner of the phone should be stopped. For example, while watching a movie or dinner with the family. Nothing, except for emergency cases, should prevent the mental break of a person: neither the sound, nor the turning on of the screen, nor the flashing of the LED, nor the vibration. Even in the center of the notification should not be displayed at this time, in case the user out of habit will check.

iOS should report the activated “Break” mode to all applications and services that send notifications so that they send them later. Or, the user must choose which notifications from which sources to mark as emergency, so that they can break through the “Break” mode.

Notification Center today is one of the most important applications in the smartphone. From the point of view of functionality, in Lollipop, the notification center is more comfortable than in iOS 8. For example, it supports cards . How can I improve the notifications myself? You can do more with them. Now both operating systems allow you to do some simple things with notifications, like closing or unfolding to read. By the way, dynamic notifications (Dynamic Notifications) in the Apple Watch are much more flexible in terms of design and actions performed with them than on the iPhone.

It is extremely important that the user has much more control over notifications. What we can do today: go to the settings and enable or disable individual applications to send notifications. However, for most users, it is easier to just delete the annoying application than to dig through the settings.

How to help people set up notifications? For example, the display option in the notification itself. The following shows how this might look like: the Demo application tells the OS that it can send three types of notifications, and the user chooses which ones to show.

Social networks and instant messengers

These applications and services constantly generate “interrupting” events. Of course, we can say that they have nothing to do with it, it is other people who send you messages. But this is only part of the problem. Once you connect to one of the networks, install some instant messenger, as the signal-to-noise ratio in your digital life immediately catastrophically deteriorates.

Take Facebook. On the one hand, it allows you to customize the sending of notifications over a wide range. But the fact is that most users leave the default settings. And if we want to cope with the problem of excess distracting events, the settings are necessary, but their mere presence is not enough.

Perhaps in this case it is worth using context and machine learning - say, something like EdgeRank . Facebook can easily determine what kind of notification a person needs and which not, without asking him to enter settings. If someone comments on the post, maybe he does not want to receive notifications about all other people's comments.

Gmail has demonstrated how machine learning can be used to separate ordinary letters from commercial ones, which it puts in the Social Networks and Promotions folders. It is necessary to get used to this, but this approach allows reducing the number of “noise” messages in the mailbox.

Messengers like WhatsApp and Viber are more difficult to control, since all messages are created by people and for people. So, theoretically, all notifications are equivalent. However, here you can apply machine learning. For example, if you write someone a message and you are answered, you will probably want to receive a notification about it. But when messages from groups that you have not joined come, is it not better to aggregate these messages, rather than receive numerous notifications?

Content creators, service owners, and application developers

All those who create software functionality can be advised to generate notifications depending on the context. This would allow to “understand” complex relationships and events in order to convey to the user only the information that he really needs, and not the information that the developer deems necessary.

Truly context-sensitive products can generate so-called "moments of magic." This term describes events when the gadget anticipates your needs and tells you about it in advance. A good example is the calendar application. If you are late for a meeting, and the calendar notifies you about its exact place and time, then this is a relevant notification. But if you are already sitting in a meeting room at this meeting, the same notice will already be an informational noise.

Achieving contextual dependence depends on three components:

1. User (like, dislike, demographics, habits, friends, etc.)
2. Environmental conditions (time, place, places nearby, etc.)
3. World (global information, such as sports news, flight delays, people who are not in your social circle, etc.)

If the notification satisfies user preferences, in the right environment, with the right information about the outside world, then that's great. If not, then the risk of a “WTF moment” is high. The best way to determine which moments your product generates - magic or WTF - is to measure the flow of push messages ( push churn ).

Finally, I would like to mention such a new direction as notification aggregators, like Yo Store . They allow information resources to inform users of events, but only at the time that the users themselves have chosen. This is useful in terms of reducing the number of distracting events, because you can choose only those types of notifications that are interesting. So aggregation and selective control are important parts of a set of measures to harmonize our digital life.

Conclusion

As we have repeatedly mentioned, our mobile applications for Android and iOS and the website yota.ru are key tools for flexible management of Yota services - using them, the client can independently connect, disconnect and change the conditions of service. We are always interested in new trends in UI / UX, and in this regard, we are attracted by this article on the optimization of notifications on mobile platforms. But perhaps, someone in the comments will also be able to share other ideas, how can people curb the growing shaft of information noise in the form of weakly structured notifications?