Spamming notifications is counterproductive

One of the first things I evaluate when I’m working on a new system is how it manages notifications. Specifically: What sort of notifications the system sends How often they’re sent How severity is evaluated, assigned, and presented How much the above can be customised and filtered We’ve been building systems to do this for decades at this point, and I’d say most I interact with still get barely a passing grade. It’s wild to me that we keep making the same mistakes; and I’d argue the stakes for getting it wrong have never been higher. If you’ll forgive the tautology, notifications are supposed to notify! You notify people to advise them of an event or circumstance, such that they can monitor it or take an action. To be an effective notification, it has to be clear, timely, accurate, reliable, and actionable. This is System Design 101. But the purpose of a system is what it does, and it seems most notification systems are designed to function as spammers. Take a facility operator for…