Digital Well-Being: If you need to resort to alert fatigue, you’re designing it wrong.

Min Jin Kim
Neha Bhomia, University of Michigan School of Information
Danny Teng
Benjamin Sutton

In a world where being connected is becoming easier and almost an inescapable part of daily life, are constant alerts helping us or breaking us down? Are designers just becoming lazy and not designing impactful products that they have to resort to a barrage of alerts to make sure users are coming back? Or is there a need for a more ethical approach keeping the mental well being of our users in mind?



Digital Well Being is a session focused on ethical and impactful design principles and delves deep into the issues of alert fatigue and how to get around it. We talk about what exactly is alert fatigue and its impact on users’ mental health and well being, what its effect looks like now and what we predict for the future.



We also talk about well established products that are known to have increased user engagement without having to resort to constant communication with the user. Our focus is to enlighten session attendees on alternate practices of increasing user engagement. We aim to highlight design practices that make product design impactful and something the users would want to come back to for its design, not because they were made to due to a constant onslaught of notifications.

https://www.midcamp.org/2019/topic-proposal/digital-well-being-if-you-need-resort-alert-fatigue-youre-designing-it-wrong

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