Understanding why all our phones are on silent. And why that’s terrible.
If you are a millennial it’s likely that this story is familiar: you are in at least one group chat (maybe several depending on how cool you are). The group chat represents a social clique you belong to and you identify with deeply.
This is how you organize but also how you socialize. Ridiculous Uber pool story? Straight to the group chat. Planning a large, multi-hour bottomless brunch the day of while still hungover? Group chat to the rescue. Complaining about crappy coworkers or sharing the deets on office incest? Once again the group chat provides.
The thing is, you also have a job. At times you even need to focus and the constant stream of direct updates from your various circles of BFFs can get in the way.
What do you do?
Leaving the group is unthinkable. You’d probably consider cutting off a pinky before being permanently banned from your favorite group chat. So how do you keep your focus?
Sometimes you silence a single group for a couple hours. Other times, when you have a little more motivation, you fiddle with your phone’s notification settings to find that perfect configuration.
In the end, you leave your phone on silent.
Silent phones freakin’ suck.
With the exception of inside a movie theater, a silenced phone is a terrible thing.
Your phone is an incredibly powerful tool to connect you with those you care about. You’d never leave home without it. It’s a way for your loved ones to reach out when they need your support. Silencing your phone severs that direct line of communication for better or for worse.
Boss trying to get ahold of you but you were white-boarding with a teammate and your one-on-one slipped your mind? Perfect time for her to call you but your phone is on silent. Girlfriend texted you that she needs Phish Food because she’s 100% certain she won’t hit her quota this month? Woulda been nice if you’d remembered to turn on your ringer before you left the office so you could swing by Safeway.
Spam. Spam. Ham. Spam.
Mobile push notifications are an extremely powerful tool for fast and effective communication. They are a way to remotely walk up to someone, tap them on the shoulder and say “Hey, I think you need to look at this right now.”
Unfortunately, not all mobile applications treat notifications in such a user-friendly manner. Often they clamor for our attention and ultimately we bend and break under notification spam. We need to stop the constant vibrating so we sacrifice our connectivity to the messages that matter.
A new hope.
Recently I’ve been working on a solution to this problem. It’s called Filtrate and it’s a smart notification filter.
Filtrate combines heuristics (think the @username heuristic from Slack or Hipchat) with machine learning to make sure you get those urgent messages. Even when you group chats are spamming the hell out of you.
For more info on how Filtrate will give you more 😘 and less 😖 from your mobile notifications, check out the link below.
