- [Dieter] So here's a question.
Why are notifications still such a pain to deal with?
I mean, if you've been paying attention, there've been
lots of stories about how phones are hacking our brains
and distracting us and-- (phone notification)
(bright elevator music)
Keeping us from focusing on what we're supposed to be doing.
Without getting too deep into it,
I think bad notifications
are the result of bad economic incentives
that have been created by bad software design,
where they pop up on your lock screen,
they make your phone make noise,
they literally cover what you're looking at,
when they come in, when you're using your phone.
All of that stuff demands your attention,
and all of that attention
equals real money for app makers
who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart.
And so, while I think we can fix
how we all set our notifications,
I also think we have to push companies,
like Apple and Google, to fix their software design.
(soft techno music)
But before we can make demands of those companies,
we should actually try to identify
what's wrong with that software design.
I wanna start with Apple.
You might know all of this stuff already,
but take a look at how these notifications work,
with a different eye.
Look at them and think,
"Do any of these notification options actually help you?"
If you scroll through this thing,
it's just a giant, unsorted list,
reverse chronological,
all of your notifications with no sense of,
what's more important than the other thing.
Then if you get beyond that,
what do you do when one of these notifications pop up?
Do you swipe a little bit? Well that does one thing.
If you swipe too hard, it jumps to a whole other screen.
Or you could force press it
and that pops up with other option.
You can tap it, and that might open it,
or maybe not, who knows.
So it's all just
super confusing you why,
and it's not intuitive at all
what you're supposed to do with it.
Okay, so let's take a look
at some of these notifications here.
So, the first one is just allow notifications.
You could turn that off.
That's like the nuclear option
and I actually recommend you use that a bunch.
But, say you need notifications,
then you've got
sounds, badge app icon,
show on lock screen, show in history,
and then shows banners,
and that's a lot of options.
In fact,
how many options is that?
We should do some math here.
Okay, math time.
On the screen, right here,
you can turn notifications on or off,
so that's two,
and then these are also on or off,
so there's two more options here, here, here, and here.
So that's one,
two,
three,
four of those,
and then this one,
it's actually three, 'cause you can
choose between these different things here.
So I thought this was gonna be a factorial thing,
but since the order doesn't matter,
it's actually just a multiplication problem.
So this is two times two times two times two.
That's two to the 4th times three.
Two to the 4th is 16,
times three,
it's 48.
Let's not forget about this guy up here,
'cause it toggles on everything else.
Add that down,
plus two.
You end up with 50.
There are 50 different ways to set up notifications,
for any given app, on your iPhone.
Last but not least, on top of all of that,
there's this other whole mode called, Do Not Disturb,
which turns everything off, but not quite everything,
so you gotta figure that out too.
I call all this confusion,
The Mystery of the Check-boxes.
I mean, the joke isn't that funny,
can we just turn the lights back on
and go back to the video.
I mean, it is a mystery,
but it's not that - [Camera Man] Alright.
big of mystery, I guess is what I'm saying.
Anyway.
Apple's philosophy is,
"You should just let notifications flow by.
Don't try and read every one and don't try and organize
your entire phone life through them."
But, I think that's kinda dumb.
Some notifications are super important.
So, then the question is,
does anybody do it better?
So this is the part where I'm supposed to go
really deep into the history of smart phones
and show you how Symbian phones,
Palm phones, and BlackBerry's,
and web OS phones, and Windows phones,
all handled notifications differently
and where each innovation came from
and I would love to do that,
but we don't have the time,
and also, all of those phones are dead.
R.I.P. all those phones.
Instead, we could just focus on how Android does things,
and I'm not gonna go through all of it
and as much detail as I did with the iPhone.
I just wanna point out a few places
where Android is smarter.
And I do have a caveat,
because this is Android and Android manufacturers
are God awful at sending out updates to their phones
and being on the most recent version.
So, we're just gonna use the Pixel 2 as an example.
Got it? Cool.
Let's start with the notification shade.
The first thing you're gonna notice
is that it's ordered by priority.
So, music's at the top,
and then there's messages,
and then there's all the other garbage.
So you know what's important right away.
The next thing is grouping
and this is the most important thing
that I love in Android is,
if I have 50 notifications from Twitter,
they all get stacked up
into this tiny, little, one line thing
and then I can expand it if I wanna see it,
or dismiss all of it, altogether, all at once.
Another thing that I love is if you're using the phone,
some notifications instead of putting a shade down
and covering the top of your screen,
they could just be non-interruptive.
They just pop a little icon in the notification screen,
you can deal with it later, which is great.
And there's this new thing called Channels,
which is a really complicated thing where
all of an apps notification settings
get put into a single screen where you can
choose different notification options
from all the different kinds of notification
the app wants to send to you.
So you can choose whether it's high priority
and it makes your phone make noise,
or low priority and it's silent,
where it doesn't get notifications at all.
And you can do that, not just for the whole app,
but for all the little things that an app wants to tell you.
I call these channel settings the Android version of
The Mystery of the Check-boxes.
No, we're not? No, yes, where we're doin' it?
Okay, we're doin' it. Great.
(Dieter sighs)
The check-boxes are just as bad on Android.
In fact, they're worse.
There's so many more check-boxes on Android
than there are on iOS.
So, it's weird for me to praise it.
The difference is that the end states,
of those check-boxes for notifications,
are actually way more humane,
they're more in my control and they're less annoying
than what happens to you on the iPhone.
The other reason I'm less annoyed with Android notifications
is that you can get to all those check-boxes
directly from the notification itself.
I'm not saying that Android notifications are perfect.
They do need work also.
In fact, I would love to see some of that
fancy machine learning that Google's always talking about,
applied more to the problem notifications.
Look, here's the truth.
Notifications, they're the new email.
They're just as important.
But, email has all these tools
for managing these messages.
It's got folders for sorting,
and stars, and archiving, and snoozing,
and all kinds of other crap.
We need to be empowered to manage our notifications,
just like we're empowered to manage our email.
Or we need a whole different approach
to solving this problem entirely, I don't know.
Earlier this year, there were a lot of stories
about how everyone's real mad at notifications.
They were in the New York Times, so Farhad Manjoo said
Apple should design a less addictive phone.
Nellie Bowles did a really interesting story
on people gray screening their phones,
so that all the color doesn't hack their lizard brains.
Although, lizards maybe don't see color, I don't know.
Look that up later.
Anyway, a bunch of this stuff comes from
this movement called Time Well Spent,
that started with a guy named Tristan Harris,
who was a design ethicist at Google,
and I don't disagree with any of it.
It is possible, for your phone,
to put you in a permanent state of distraction.
The metaphor everybody uses is
that it's like a slot machine.
You pull down on the notification shade,
just like you pull on a lever on a slot machine.
I don't really like that metaphor,
because I think it takes away too much power from you.
The person who, I don't know,
owns the slot machine, the phone.
You should only give them that power
if they deliver something really valuable to you
and too often they don't.
But Apple, I'm sorry, you need to help us out here.
There's only so much that we as users can do,
given all of the options you've given us.
Because notifications, they're not going away
and just treating them as little puffy clouds,
floating by on our lock screens,
that isn't gonna work.
I got a few people I need to thank for this video.
I wanna thank Vlad Savov for coming up with the metaphor
of iPhone notifications being
puffy clouds floating away.
Patrick Lupotto, thank you for fixing my math.
I had it super wrong and you saved me.
Also thanks to former Verge reporter Jeff Blagdon who,
in a completely different context came up with the phrase,
The Mystery of the Check-boxes,
which I just deeply love.
And of course, thank you for watching.