What Every Software Vendor Should Learn From This Glorious Ghost Alert

I've ranted before about the sad state of software notifications. I'd love to see a proper research paper, but I suspect that few apps and systems give users the timely and relevant notifications they need to do their jobs effectively. Instead, enterprise apps far too often bombard employees with duplicate alerts and irrelevant messages while missing key ones.

Type I Errors: Frustrating False Positives

Near the top of my list of alert bugaboos today: the iPad app for my beloved Notion repeatedly displays phantom notifications. bells, Margaret, we had no idea.

I wish.

The company has acknowledged the bogus red badges signifying exactly nothing, but has chosen not to fix the issue. As its support and engineering teams recently confirmed with me:

It's beyond frustrating, but not unexpected behavior from large software vendors. In another ironic twist, Notion alerts also fail in another important way. I don't know about PC users, but Mac owners have to manually check if Notion needs an update after the company drops one. Latest doesn't pick Notion's most recent versions up either.

Today, AI and enterprise search are all the rage in Notion world. Sadly, the company is doing a poor job communicating basic app changes. This page would work if Notion actually kept it current, in contrast to Zoom's timely release notes. But I digress ...

Outlook's Non-Alerts

To paraphrase the great Gary Gulman, I've profiled this criminal before. Notion is hardly the first software company to prioritize sexy new features over basic app maintenance.