How many alerts on your mobile have you ignored today?

Out of the tens or hundreds of notifications, emails, and messages we receive every day, only a few really matter.

The same logic applies to business, as many software systems were designed around the idea that if we keep end-users informed, we help them act faster.

In practice, this good intention created an unwanted pattern: the system keeps notifying end-users, they feel overwhelmed, and the human mind is implicitly trained to ignore most of these alerts.

None of us is an exception, neither on a personal level nor on a business level. A study from The Reuters Institute highlighted the risk of alert fatigue in news notifications, as some users receive up to 50 alerts per day, and many disable alerts when they become too frequent or not useful.

At the business level, Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reported that knowledge workers can receive a ping around every 1.75 minutes during the workday, about 275 interruptions in 8 hours!

Still, the real risk goes far beyond fatigue, as important and critical alerts get buried with the ordinary ones we might ignore.

Leading companies in the software industry have responded through several approaches. They introduced personalized notifications, classified notifications by severity, and even converted some notifications into automated, pre-designed tasks.

This creates the trend: do not notify more, notify better.

In practice, “better” does not only mean controlling the number or behavior of notifications, but more importantly improving their context.

As an example, instead of a “Low Stock” notification, we can focus on the criticality of the stock level and its business effect, and make the message become: “A fast-moving item dropped below safety stock in a high-demand branch, supplier delivery is delayed, and open customer orders are increasing.”

Another matter we should consider is the relationship between events. Take this scenario as another example: One notification states “Sales Increased” while another states “Margin Declined.”

The smarter way to deliver the insight is:

“Sales increased while margin declined because discounts were concentrated in one channel.”

In my personal opinion, this pattern would not only reduce fatigue, but also drive the right action when it is delivered to the right person at the right time.