Alerts!

In the digital era that we are living and with the advancement of technology, it is so much easier and quick to alert the respective person/team. But with the alarming rate of alerts that we receive each day, an alert actually loses its meaning and quite often ignored defeating the very purpose of the alert. However, every one of us know the significance of these alerts/notifications and many of us depend on these convenient mechanism to lean on. Then, what is becoming imperative is the way these alerts and notifications are designed. In order to design the same, we need to understand the alerts little in detail.

The alerts/notifications can be of three categories

Reminders – This category of alerts are the ones that will not create potential damage when the person reminded failed to act on it. Any sort of reminder, ranging from meeting schedule reminder, important events reminder, approval requests, escalation requests are to name a few. These reminders can be further classified as pervasive i.e. no one / nothing impacted, only personal damage probably , ex: meeting reminder, event reminder are pervasive in nature and non-pervasive i.e. someone is waiting for the action of the one who gets these reminders, examples are approvals, escalations, etc.

Warnings – This category prompts one in advance that something is going to happen and failing to take action of which will impact the business, operations or day to day activities. Example: low inventory, reserved indication in cars, build fail in CI, etc.

Alarms – This category says loud and non-stop until one take action as the potential damage / impact had already taken place and it needs one’s immediate attention /action.

With this in mind following are the design aspects to ponder and consider

• Types of Alerts

Passive Vs Active --> Alerts can be passive (one needs to take effort to notice, such as logging into the portal) vs active (one would be notified by mail, message, at times by phone). System should support both these types.

• Medium of Alerts

The medium of alerts varies from portal (through dashboards or any other visual notations), email, and phone messages to any other special mechanisms such as auto dialing, buzzer, etc.

• Configurations

Type Configuration --> Except for Critical Alarm category (this should remain as active), the rest of the category of alerts should be able to be configurable as passive or active. Yes, within Alarm category there can be critical, high, medium and low classification, fire alarm is Critical, while bill payment overdue is medium/low, this is Alarm as this is going to cost you a penalty however it is not as critical as fire alarm where one has to attend to it immediately.

Periodic Specifications --> Even in the case of active alerts, the periodical consolidation instead individual mail/message alerts should be supported. Meaning, an end of day / start of day report on what are pending for one’s approval by mail/message. Or every 2 hours, one can opt to get new enquiries, or once in a week a PM can opt to get pending CRs, so on and so forth.

Default settings --> It is always good idea/ practice to give default settings. It is suggestive recommendations which are indications and helpful for a novice user. Decide on which category the alerts falls in and take a call on whether to design it as a passive one or active one. For example in case if reminders it can be a passive one, unless an user configure it to be active on, whereas alarms are ones that need to be designed as active ones. Warnings can be active, but need not be one by one, it can be consolidated and reported periodically, say every 2 hours or end of day.