I’ve been considering the role of notifications both for email, texting, and apps and I think it could be improved.

Notifications serve to inform us of an interesting insight or tidbit that we should go and revisit the service or producer of content. However most notification implementations are binary. Either the notifier is allowed to notify you or it isn’t.

For example: If I visit an interesting website about apples and possibly want future information then I need to give my email to them. However the apple website has a heavy incentive to send as many emails as possible as it wants the consumer (me) to stay on its site as much as possible. This happens similarly with app notifications (and Facebook games a couple years ago) which is why they kept spamming people. The flip side is completely saying no. Either not giving out your email, not installing the app, or just denying permissions of the app completely.

What we really should have is a gradient of the amount of notifications we want from each producer (site, app, etc.). For example if I only want one notification per week for a discount website then after setting it the most notifications it can send is once per week. Or it could be 3,5, 7 per week etc. The producer will be told how many its allowed to send, forcing the producer to send the most relevant notifications or create summary notifications. Rather than spamming the consumer repeatedly.