Mara Kestrel Booking from February 2027

6 min read

The case for fewer alerts

Alert fatigue is a design problem, not a discipline problem. Four questions I ask before any notification ships.

Alerts compete with each other

Every product team thinks its notification is the important one. Added together, they become noise. In hospitals this has a name, alarm fatigue, and it has been linked to missed warnings.

The fix is rarely more urgent colours. It is fewer, better-timed interruptions.

Four questions

Before a new alert ships, I ask: Does the person need to act? Can they act right now? What happens if they see it in an hour? Is there a calmer place to put this, like a list they already check?

If the answer to the third question is “nothing much”, it is not an alert. It is a list item.

Group, delay, summarise

Non-urgent updates can be grouped into a summary at a natural pause: the start of a shift, the end of a task. Urgent ones should interrupt, and should be rare enough to be believed.

Urgent alerts should be rare enough to be believed.

Measure the silence

Teams measure clicks on notifications. Few measure how many were ignored, dismissed unread or switched off. Those numbers tell you how much trust you have spent.

— Mara

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Night Ward A ward board for night-shift nurses that turns forty competing priorities into one calm list.
Tideline A public flood-warning service that shows how sure the forecast is, not only what it says.
Northline fares A fare finder that leads with the cheapest valid ticket and explains the rules in plain words.
Quire An accessible design system I maintain, where every colour pair ships with its contrast ratio.
Furrow An offline-first harvest log for small farms, designed for wet gloves and no signal.
Designing for 3 a.m. Most interfaces are designed at 11 in the morning by rested people. Some are used at 3 at night by exhausted ones. Here is what changes.
The case for fewer alerts Alert fatigue is a design problem, not a discipline problem. Four questions I ask before any notification ships.
Write the empty state first The first screen most people see is an empty one. Designing it first makes the rest of the product clearer.
Design tokens are a contract, not a palette A token named after a colour tells you what it looks like. A token named after a role tells you what it promises. Only one of those survives a redesign.
What a flood map taught me about uncertainty People trust forecasts more when you tell them how sure you are. Showing uncertainty is a design skill, and a public duty.
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