Preemptive notification
(flickr tag: annoying)
Twice today I received preemptive notifications of notifications.
First, I plugged in my mp3 player so I could update it. The first message I got was “Preparing to scan for tracks.” This was shortly followed by “Scanning for tracks.” Later, I bought a book from Barnes & Noble’s website. Right away, I got an e-mail saying “We have received your order. In an email to follow, we will provide you with the date(s) we expect your order to be ready to ship.” And, sure enough, this was followed by an e-mail with the details of my order.
This makes me think of the Futurama episode “How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back”, where Hermes gets a letter saying “You are about to receive a letter from Central Bureaucracy.” Shortly after, he gets a letter from Central Bureaucracy.
I’ve seen a rising trend in these types of messages and I think they are quite annoying. I understand the intent is to keep the user informed of system status so they don’t think it’s hung up, but this level of detail only exposes implementation details that are not necessary for the user to know. They don’t need to know that you’re preparing to initialize a process. These types of things really shouldn’t take long enough to require their own status messages. Even if they do, it’s better to just say that you’re “Scanning for tracks” while in the background you’re initializing that process. Telling users that you’re preparing for something just takes their attention away from something more important to read an unnecessary message. Status messages should be useful, not annoying.
