The economy of notifications

A need for precise communication and transparency underlies many aspects of our lives. We collect excessive amounts of information, set up various news feeds, and engage in social media by sharing personal details, following other users’ activities. That’s nothing new. Why, for centuries, the survival of our species depended on the awareness of food sources and life-threatening situations. Being left out could determine not only the quality of our lives but might have impacted our survival in the first place. 

Even though it’s usually not a matter of life and death these days, we’re constantly monitoring our surroundings for any threats to our safety. The development of the technology has not only expanded the surveillance range to the whole world. The internet and social media brought us a sense of belonging and support from other users. With mobile devices, predictive text and speech to text software, keeping the loop going seems almost effortless. You probably keep your personal message centre by your side most of the time. Being the first to know about new offers, best deals and order status is at your fingertips. News floods you via SMS, emails and notifications – you don’t need to hunt them anymore. 

But at what cost?

You have a specific stock of attention at your disposal, and sadly – limited power over this resource. It can focus on one thing and constantly gets bored, involuntarily searching for new attractions. A piece of text, a button, a car honking on the street, a modal, funny cat video, a bit of animation, shopping list, flashing banner… everything seems valuable. Everything is stealing your attention from your work. Unless you are superhuman, it’s pretty easy to exhaust your attention or throw it out of balance. 

It might be a phone call, a teammate’s question, a red dot marking Slack’s icon, or a screen phone lighting up with an email preview. An average context switch consumes around 23 minutes of productivity, regardless of the distractor. Those numbers may vary with task mechanics, intellectual and emotional immersion [Tom DeMarco. “Slack”]. 

Let’s take the whole work environment into account. Frequent context switches and heavy multitasking may lead to a 40% decrease in productivity, causing stress and errors that cost the global economy approximately $450 billion a year. In that context, are all alerts equally significant?

The three levels of urgency

Notifications can be pushy and irritating to an extent. But they indisputably became a device that helps us stay in the know and feel secure. We can’t keep ourselves in the vacuum to save those hundreds of billions of dollars. Still, we can limit our interactions with the system to important and assistive features – not meaningless and distractive ones. We can try to arrange alerts by the level of immediate attention they require to better understand the priorities.

High-attention
Some pieces of information are vital to our survival, health and safety, or our property’s integrity. Those are alerts, errors, exceptions and confirmations for potentially destructive actions. Those are usually bound to the warnings about imminent danger, malfunctions, fraud attempts, losing crucial data or other valuables and therefore require immediate reaction. 

Medium-attention
Every action should trigger a reaction – similar to the real world. You might not feel the exact physics using your pointer, keyboard or touch screen, but you still get those tiny clues that are guiding you through the meanders of the system. They are not only acknowledgements of users actions and success messages but also cautionary messages. 

Low-attention
The system should provide you with its current condition, even if there’s no action needed. Just to signal readiness and create trust in the product. Toasts, badges, and status indicators are an essential part of this feedback loop. Still, you should keep in mind that no information is also an information. 

As a user, you usually have no clue about the message content and its severity until you investigate it. The same notification could lead to a life-changing offer, a mid-season sale, a critical home appliance error, opening of a new restaurant in your location, a new word of the day, a message that your relative is in the hospital, another word of the day or a Candy Crush bonus, a reminder to stand up, a mortgage offer, a customer satisfaction survey, a message that the server is still running smoothly or a notification about new Instagram followers. Even though spam filters are getting more efficient at seeding out unwanted mail, you might fall into the trap of banner blindness and miss the critical ones. 

Fortunately, product designers address the notification overload bit by bit, introducing “do not disturb” modes and easy to customize presets that enhance focus in various situations. Unlike airplane mode, those smart wellbeing features allow contacts marked as favourite to override settings and cut through the silence. You can easily stay in the loop without “the fear of missing out” taking control over your life.

Is it just a productivity issue?

You can ask your colleagues not to interrupt your deep work and talk to your managers about a more effective work environment. You may close your messaging apps, turn your phone face down, put it into focus mode, or use guerilla email addresses to get a promo code. But that doesn’t mean those messages are non-existent nor harmless. Surely they won’t clog up your inbox. Long gone are the times when all of us minded each Megabyte of internet, and we had only 100 MB of space at our disposal. Nowadays, it’d take years and hundreds of thousands of messages to intimidate a free plan from any mainstream email provider. 

According to Mike Berners-Lee, an average spam email is worth 0.3 g CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent), a standard email with little (or no) rich content – 4 g CO₂e, and an email with big attachments: 50 gCO₂e [Mike Berners-Lee. “How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything”. 2011]. While one message might seem innocent, a whole stew of emails sent and received can add up to surprising numbers. 

An average office worker receives 100 emails per day (it seems a lot, but it’s not impossible). Half of these will be spam. Half of the remaining contains attachments or large images: 

50 spam emails x 0.3 g CO₂e = 15 g CO₂e
25 standard emails x 4 g CO₂e = 100 g CO₂e
25 emails with attachments x 50 g CO2e = 1250 g CO2e

The entire days’ worth of emails received equals 1365 g CO₂e, which matches a trace left by a fancy bottle of wine, transported for thousands of kilometres by road. 

To put it into another perspective, let’s recall the McColo takedown. On November 11, 2008, McColo Inc, a US-based hosting company renowned for distributing spam and other malware, was taken offline by its upstream service providers. Overnight, global spam volume dropped by 70 per cent, bringing profound relief not only for your inbox but also for the planet. As ICF calculated, the reduced email traffic was proportionate to taking 2.2 million passenger vehicles off the road. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, we moved not only our professional duties, meetings and documents to the web but also a significant part of our personal activities. Learning, shopping, leisure, and socializing via the internet was often not only a convenience but a must. A significant portion of the new users got excited with technology enough to keep using online shops and services instead of searching for on-site providers. 

With hundreds of billions of emails, messages and notifications exchanged daily worldwide and even more online ads, promoting any business is a tough nut to crack. And some suppliers mix up overcommunication with customer care. 

A perfect online shop or service would send just one confirmation email with a thank you message, a link to a page with order status updates, receipts, and a feedback form. Maybe also a note that this is the only message you should receive to look after your wellbeing and the planet. Sometimes things go sidetracked, like a rejected payment or cancelled order, and a heads-up message is necessary. Yet, some shops manage to issue 12 emails regarding one order, ranging from order confirmations through payment and shipment providers to notifications from in-between parties. Even though most of those emails contain a link to the order in Baselinker and parcel tracking. 

Just imagine sales clerks in a bakery informing you in detail about each step of the shopping process: from coming into the store to a customer satisfaction interview right after the purchase. Listening to that would be absurd and unbearable. 

Embarrassment of riches

One online purchase is usually only the beginning of the newsletter bonanza. We can distinguish at least 19 types of e-commerce messages used to create engagement and boost sales that storm your inbox:

1. Welcome email to get you acquainted with the brand. 
2. Reactivation email to come back after brand inactivity. 
3. Offer email with an incentive to drive sales or reward loyal customers. 
4. Upsell email with offers of add-ons to the last purchase. 
5. Cross-sell email with an incentive to buy other products from the shop. 
6. Announcement of new products. 
7. Holiday email taking advantage of your festive shopping spree.
8. Abandoned cart email reminding you about unfinished purchases.
9. Birthday email with a special gift or discount – just for you.
10. Newsletter email to keep you posted about the brand story.
11. Educational email that helps you get the best experience out of the brand.
12. Customer loyalty email with a reward for the most devoted users.
13. Thank you email as an expression of gratitude for any milestone achieved by the brand. 
14. Confirmation email with a recap about the order, shipment, and return policy. 
15. Feedback email where the brand asks you directly about your needs and satisfaction. 
16. Email to customize newsletter preferences to give you a sense of power over the campaign. 
17. “You missed it” email that guilt trips you about past deals and coupons. 
18. “Browse the abandonment” email that follows you up if you don’t add anything to the cart. 
19. Complete your profile to encourage you to fill up your account details and increase your commitment. 

Not knowing the exact cost of those actions, we try to balance the cold light of our screen and the blurred edges of antialiased letters with extra courtesies, fancy GIFs, and a handful of emoji. The problem is that no amount of emoji solves the actual issue. We are still searching for the best way to map and extend the physical world into the digital, and we might still be a bit lost in this translation. Despite all those efforts, most of the emails dispassionately go to trash face down. So, at the end of the day, a low-cost, low-carbon technology results in more disruption, ill-being, higher-carbon emissions, and billions of dollars lost beyond retrieval. 

War is too important to be left to the generals.

Georges Clemenceau

Regardless of your social background and digital literacy, you benefit from technological progress anyway. By all means, there is no chance the world will set science aside and live like our ancestors. You cannot deny or overpower technology. It will always find an outlet. There is only one option: we all have to move forward and evolve with the industry. The responsibility for taking a comprehensive, sustainable approach towards technology and placing the good of humanity in the centre of interest lies upon each of us. 

And amazingly, no matter who you are, you can start the journey to the better wellbeing of your environment with a humble notification.