A few years ago, I turned off nearly every notification on my phone. And then I embraced focus mode. Then I made it a habit to unsubscribe from things on a regular basis and turn off all the bells, buzzers, and whistles on platforms I’m part of. And unsurprisingly, I am happier and calmer.
Despite knowing that there is a human just like me on the other end of the many products and tools that I use that is being measured on things like awareness, acquisition, CTAs, return rate, bounce rate, and all that… I am that customer.
And being that customer, I try to remember myself and my own behavior when I’m the builder. I don’t want to be annoyed by real-time notifications. I don’t want to be bombarded by daily digests. And you will not trigger my sense of FOMO or anxiety with that dreaded ‘red dot’ and number.
Clearly somewhere along the way, we decided that pull - the little behavioral thing that makes someone come back on their own - was something you just need to install, toggle on, and tune.
That’s it. Clearly.
Y’all know I love my architectural analogies on here, so let’s put in this way: you built a doorbell dressed up as a strategy.
Doorbells demand something the moment they ring. They don’t give a darn about what you were doing or how much you don’t want to people right now. Notification driven design runs on that same freaking logic: manufactured urgency engineered so that the recipient feels obligated to look and for the worst of them - acknowledge… even if nothing in their actual behavior in the prior moment required it.
Sigh.
Now in comparison: what if you built a porch light as a community strategy.
Porch lights do absolutely nothing most of the time. No ringing, no demanding. It’s just there, switched on, unbothered, and requiring absolutely nothing. But the moment the path is just a bit too dark or you can’t find your keys? It’s exactly what you want, when you need it.
I’m convinced porch lights are a better strategy for communities.
What if your content stopped being a push channel and started being a findable one?
What if your communication cadence stopped being about frequency and started being about reliability?
The part about this that is most unnerving is knowing how much of our own behavior has to change: the itch to manufacture urgency, to send one more nudge, to reopen a thread that’s naturally cooling because the dashboard looks better with the number ticking up.
And what you report upward has to shift with it. Time since last visit tells you a whole lot of nothing about whether the doorbell like thing is working. Whether the answer was there, correct, and findable the exact moment somebody needed it? That tells you almost everything.
Of course, none of this means never send a notification. Sometimes a doorbell like urgency is exactly right thing in the moment - such as a security alert which absolutely should interrupt someone’s evening or the ability to turn on extra alerts for specific triggers. But what it does mean is noticing which one your whole system has been built to depend on like it’s very existence depends on it.
The porch light doesn’t check its analytics at midnight to see who noticed it was on. It just stays lit, for the one person who needed it to be.