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Should our notifications be more peaceful?

How to create better notifications, and protect yourself from digital overload

Michael J. Fordham
UX Collective

Context switching: “In its simplest form context switching is jumping between various, unrelated tasks.” — Jessica Harris, Trello

I’m a front-end developer. Part of my role means I sometimes have to fix really strange and elaborate bugs.

For example, I might have to inspect why a response from a server isn’t directly mapping to the data model I wrote, or a piece of admin UI is showing to a regular user for no reason.

Often, it takes a bit of time to find the root cause of these problems, and continued focus.

However, sometimes that focus is hard to come by, because I’m constantly being bombarded by notifications on different devices.

For example, I’ll be writing some code, and my Mac will inform me there are updates available, Amazon will light up my phone saying they think I’d like a new bike and Twitter will alert me that some people I follow liked another person’s tweet.

Immediately I have lost my focus and have to dismiss all of these interruptions and try again.

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