Founders Note #1 : The Notification Dilemma

Notifications are one of those features that seem simple until you’re responsible for designing them.

Too few, and people forget to take medications or miss important appointments.

Too many, and they become background noise—or worse, another source of stress.

For someone managing a chronic illness, that balance matters even more. So where’s the line?

That’s the question I’ve been thinking a lot about managing notifications within Health Harmony’s medicine logging. I often get annoyed by apps that do too many notifications and there’s definitely a fine line between being helpful and annoying. In doing some research with users and others, I’ve found that many people feel the same. Often notifications get turned off entirely if they become to invasive to the flow of life.

Personally, I don’t like notifications that are “preemptive” reminders (reminding you to do an action - ex. “5 minutes til this thing happens”) or notifications that don’t turn off after the action is completed. Notifications should be helpful to the user - not just something to ignore. They should prompt a meaningful action - in this particular use case, logging mediation to their daily timeline.

It’s a challenging situation to get right - but it’s worth spending time trying to solve.

Here’s where I’m at right now:

1. I think the notifications should be prompting the user to check something off their to do list; if the item is already completed, don’t prompt the user.

2. Users should be able to snooze a notification for a short period of time - sometimes notifications show up at the worst possible moment but you do actually want to check off something

3. I want to apply notifications to actions that the user needs to compete on a regular cadence. For this particular use case, the user should log their medication every day at a specific time. A notification would be helpful to remind the user to either take their medication or log what they have already taken. That feels most supportive to the user.

I don’t know if this is the right solution but I think this flow would be better than just having universal notification at one point in time for the day. I’m interested to get feedback from users about their experience with this type of notification system and if it reduces the mental load of remembering to take and log medication.