Push Notifications Are Organizational Marshmallows

It’s a notifications’ world, we’re just living in it.

Companies can’t help but try and get your attention via email, text, or push notifications and drive you to their app.

Push notifications in particular are a powerful tool — and where there’s power, there’s abuse.

I’m sure you, dear reader, have had your notifications abused by overly-eager companies (here’s a screenshot example of what I’m talking about, courtesy of a Medium article).

Ben Thompson and John Gruber were talking about this on a recent episode of Dithering^[1] and I loved Ben’s framing of push notification use as the marshmallow test for companies.

(What’s a marshmallow test? A famous experiment where they offered children a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small but delayed rewards. A researcher would leave a child in a room with a single marshmallow for about 15 minutes then return. If they didn’t eat the marshmallow, the reward was two marshmallows. There are lots of videos re-enacting this test on YouTube for those interested.)

In this case, companies are the children and push notifications are the marshmallows. The engagement catnip push notifications produce is intoxicating. People know they can increase metrics any time they amp up notifications. It takes a lot of restraint — and often someone with organizational clout — to put a foot down and say, “We’re not going to abuse this because the long-term costs are too significant.”

Thus notification usage is a test of self-control, one too many companies fail. In fact if a company can exercise the restraint to not abuse push notifications, that’s a signal of how well-run they are! Here’s Ben:

Notification abuse is an example of why big company management is hard. What’s happening is someone [in the org] their KPI is “monthly active users” and they’re like, “I can turn this dial and get more monthly active users.” But they’re not the VP of “Good Taste” or “Don’t Piss Off Your Users” and so [exercising restraint] falls through the cracks. There’s probably some sort of metric you could do on company management dysfunction based on the number of abuse of notifications you get.

John chimed in with his own observation on how even Apple isn’t a role model in their own platform:

Apple is prone to abuse the little red badges you get in Settings because they’re the only ones who can do them. “What’s this red badge? Oh they’re offering me Apple Music, which I already have, for $5/month.” Because somebody was like “Oh my god, do you understand how many Apple Music subscriptions we sell when get that red badge in there?”

It’s a test of restraint and wisdom: can you forgo the short-term bump in metrics from (obtrusive) notifications in exchange for the long-term health, trust, and engagement of users?

Going forward, anytime I see my own notifications abused — besides getting angry and 1) turning off the app’s notifications, or 2) deleting the app — I’ll picture that notification as a yummy little marshmallow that somebody just couldn’t resist!