Of course, Dave Pell nails it. When it comes to user experience, notifications are often annoying…

But (I’m sure you expected this!), in my mind, they serve an extremely important role: time-stamping.

If you know me, you know how much I believe the web is moving from a spatial organization to a time-based organization. In space, we have addresses in the form of URLs. In the time dimension, the equivalent of an address is a time-stamp. It’s the answer to the WHEN? question when the url is the answer to the WHERE? question.

Everybody agree it’s critical to have the right location for every message, similarly, it’s equally important to attach the right time-stamp to every message as well.

With that in mind, I invite everyone designing systems which send notifications to think of the exact time at which the user needs, wants or expect to get a notification, as trivial as it may be: context is king!