Cellphone Notifications
Cellphones allow us to stay connected and updated even where we are not present. Part of the design of cellphones that allows us to do this is notifications. Almost every application we use has notifications in some way to give the user some type of information. Whether that notification may be of any importance however, varies upon the app. The content of a notification could contain anything from a new email, or a game reminding you to play. How many times have you looked at your phone because you got a notification only to put your phone back down or ignore it because it wasn’t “important”?
We hope to minimize this by allowing users the option to sort their notification order by priority rather than time. This would mean that rather than seeing notifications in the order they come in throughout the day, if a notification from an app with high priority comes in, it will be shown at the top while notifications with low priority will be lower, rather than at the top because it’s new.
iOS Notifications
Currently on iPhones and iOS devices, notifications can be shown to the user in three ways: On the lock screen, notification center, and at the top of the screen (Banners). The banner notifications also have the option to be either temporary or persistent, meaning that once it shows up at the top of the screen, it won’t go away unless the user physically swipes it up off the screen.
This allows users to choose where and how they see notifications for specific apps, but no way to control the specific capable notifications of an app by. what is seen as most important.
Users also have the option to enable or disable notification sounds and badges that alert the user audibly and visibly. Badges aren’t the best way to convey critical information and are mainly used as reminders to check the app.
Lock Screen & Notification Center
On the iOS lock screen and notification center, multiple notifications from the same app also have the ability to be grouped, allowing more space on the screen for additional information. This is a great way to prevent notification spam on the screen from any app. Notification grouping also has the option to be turned off, automatic, or by app. The default setting is automatic where the phone automatically sorts the notification itself, however, there are some shortcomings to this feature. For example, if you are messaged by the same person at two different times, rather than grouping those text messages together, the newest one will create a new stack.
The By App option for grouping only fixes this partially, with new notifications being separate but if ignored, eventually joins into the stack.
Android Notifications
On Android smartphones, notifications appear as icons on the top left of the status bar which stay present. Swiping down on the status bar opens up the notification drawer, which gives more information and allows the user to interact with it.
Similarly to iOS, many of the same features are present as well, such as banners that disappear and a system of grouping notifications from the same app, highlighting more to see with a (+ #) on the bottom right.
A feature that only exists on Android however, is a notification importance feature. The user can assign the priority of an app out of four different levels: Urgent, High, Medium, & Low, each with their own meaning. However, a weakness of this is that it only applies to how the notification is alerted to the user.
Why Priority > Time
The decision to allow users to give specific apps notification cation priority allows them to save time and gives the user knowledge as to what pertains most to them. A challenge that comes with solving this problem, is making sure that the user is still aware of all their notifications and that the different alerts within apps can be prioritized. Applications have different notifications with varying levels of importance.
For example, an app such as Postmates has a multitude of varying notifications: Notifications alerting you as to different stages as to your food delivery, as well as random notifications offering promotion codes. If we look at these types of notifications in terms of importance for the user, one would say the alerts pertaining to your delivery would be the most important. Thus, these notifications should be given higher priority than others. Some apps also give the option to turn off specific types of notifications, such as social media apps with likes, follows, and messages.
Another challenge we may have to address is the Do Not Disturb feature present on many smartphones. This feature blocks all notification alerts from being shown to the user other than select calls. However, users should be able to allow certain apps of their choice to be able to go through this.
