Attention
2 min read
Against the Badge
A red number in a corner is a small lie about urgency. Here is what I use instead.
From the series · The Quiet Software
By Mara Ellison · Lisbon
I once counted fourteen red badges on my phone before breakfast, and not one of them was urgent. A badge makes a claim: something here needs you. Most of the time the claim is false, and we learn to ignore it, which means that on the rare day it is true, we ignore that too.[1]
What a badge actually counts
Badges count whatever is easy to count: unread items, pending invites, new features. They rarely count what matters, because what matters is hard to reduce to a number. So the badge measures volume and presents it as importance.
Three alternatives
A digest at a time the person chooses, instead of a constant tally.
A quiet state that shows nothing when nothing needs doing, and means it.
A single honest signal for the one thing that is truly time-sensitive.
None of these are new ideas. They are just less exciting on a growth chart.[2]
The quiet corner
In my own projects I have stopped shipping badges entirely. Nobody has complained. A few people have written to say the app feels calmer, which I suspect is the same thing as saying it respects them.[3]
Notes
Psychologists call this alarm fatigue. Hospitals have studied it for decades; software mostly hasn't.
If a feature only works when people feel slightly anxious, it is not a feature.
This closes The Quiet Software. Thank you to everyone who wrote in after part one.
Written by
Mara Ellison
Product designer in Lisbon. Writes about quiet software, attention and the slow craft of making things.
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