High Priority Text Alerts, Please!
Your phone should be able to tell you when an important text has been sent
Sorry, I Missed Your Text
Maybe one of the following scenarios have happened to you:
- You are at work and you receive a text notification, which you ignore because you are in the groove, only to look up later and find that text was alerting you to pre-sale tickets to the Beyonce & Kanye tour.
- Your phone is tucked away in your bag or pocket. You miss the text notification all-together and you only find out that you have missed the pre-sale for the Beyonce & Kanye tour.
Beyonce and Kanye have never toured together but chances are, you’ve missed some pretty important texts simply because you didn’t know they were important. But what if your phone could tell you?
Highnotes
Ways of letting phone users know they have received an important text include
- Changing the notification style. (i.e., 3 buzzes instead of the occasional two or a more forceful buzz)
- Notifying more often (i.e., phone buzzes until the text is viewed)
For the purposes of this post, let’s call high priority text notifications highnotes, which is short for ‘high importance notifications’.
I Could See This Highnote Thing Getting Ugly…
Who amongst us wants to give potentially annoying people the ability to pester us with highnote texts? I certainly don’t.
That’s why there would be safeguards in place to curtail their abuse akin to read-notifications.
- They would be opt-in. Factory shipped, your phone wouldn’t allow them.
- You can delegate the ability for people to send you highnote texts on a contact-by-contact basis
- You can set the intensity of the highnote texts.
I Could See This Highnote Thing Being Pretty Cool
We’re living in a world of increased connection and interconnectivity with our devices, but part of perfecting their use is knowing when they can be ignored. Anecdotes about the iWatch center around it allows people to interact with their phones less. Highnotes would benefit users in a similar manner. Texts which are important would be pushed into our consciousness while things like “you see this video” are dealt with in a free moment. The easy-to-miss vibration of a text notification wouldn’t be so scary if we knew the important texts would get through.
