The Tricky Challenge of "Alerts"

Most every collaboration tool has some form of alerts function, to send emails to all or selected members when there is a new posting.  Having used about a dozen different collaboration tools over the years, I have come to appreciate how important it is for a tool to get this right.

Being too passive with sending alerts means that those members who choose not to log in to the site on a regular basis miss a great deal of interplay and activity -- perhaps in discussion areas where they should be involved early and often.  Being too aggressive with sending alerts (such as what OneHub does every time a user views or downloads a single file) can overwhelm some users and cause them to tune out; some have gone so far as to mark the alerts as spam, so too many alerts turns into no alerts.

The trick is for the tool designers to define a user interface where both the person posting messages and the person receiving alerts can control their settings.  BaseCamp does an adequate job of this.  But I would go farther and suggest that top sites should make the setting of alerts options a key part of the sign-in process and the user dashboard.  It needs to be part of the upfront education process.  I would even go so far and recommend an interface such as Facebook offers for selecting the types of friend news feeds, with sliding indicators of "more of" and "less of" for different categories of news.

The bottom line is that the alerts function is a critical part of the interface, rather than a nice feature to throw in. 

Update on 24 December 2010 by Lokesh Datta

See related Posts:

• A Taxonomy of Collaboration Tools
• Keep it simple on the collaboration tools