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The design of silence

The design of silence

Notification overload: what each alert costs our attention

Notification overload finally has a measurable price. In March, the Institute of Psychology at the University of Lausanne published a study of 180 students in Computers in Human Behavior: a single social media alert slows cognitive processing by about seven seconds. Participants received more than a hundred a day on average, and what drove distraction was mostly how often they got pinged and checked their phones, rather than the total time they spent on screens.

Seven seconds multiplied by a hundred adds up to nearly twelve minutes of focus evaporating every day, before counting what it takes to pick up the thread again. Forbes, too, in a September 19 article on the return of the 32-hour workweek, lines up constant interruptions, information overload and decision fatigue as the real enemies of knowledge work.

My relationship with the little red dot

Here I have to confess a personal intolerance: I can’t stand the unread badge. The tiny number on the mail icon, the red circle on the messaging app, the email left unopened: as long as they sit there, something inside me gets restless. I need to see my screen dead calm, like the Adriatic off Pescara on a windless morning. That’s why I’m following what’s happening in product teams with relief, almost with gratitude: after years spent chasing engagement through a barrage of pings, someone has started subtracting.

Compared with what I wrote in Less screen, more presence, where the focus was on individual habits, this time the view shifts to the other side: to the people who design counters, default settings and groupings.

Calm technology: a principle coming back into fashion

The idea has deep roots. In the mid-1990s, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown at Xerox PARC were talking about calm technology: tools able to inform while staying at the periphery of attention, stepping forward only when needed. Amber Case later gathered those principles into a handbook for designers. For a long time they remained conference material; today they are turning into default choices, and the default, as I wrote about accessibility, is the most powerful decision a team can make, because most people will never change it.

Chrome revokes permissions from sites nobody listens to

The most telling figure comes from Google: according to the Chrome blog, fewer than 1% of notifications receive any interaction at all. Since fall 2025, the browser on desktop and Android automatically removes the permission to send alerts from sites that push out plenty of them while drawing almost no engagement, lets users know, and leaves them free to switch them back on. In testing, volume dropped significantly while total clicks barely moved; in fact, sites that sent fewer messages saw their response rate climb. A lesson marketers should pin above their desks.

Android 16: forced grouping and volume that fades

With Android 16, released in June 2025, Google introduced two mechanisms that work as a pair. The first is called notification cooldown: when an app fires off bursts in quick succession, the system progressively lowers the sound after the first chime. The second is mandatory grouping, which bundles together alerts from the same application whether or not the developer planned for it.

In December, the Notification Organizer reached the Pixel 9 and 10. It sorts incoming pings into categories and, by default, tucks promotions and news into a muted, collapsed bundle. For now it only works in English and in six countries, Italy not among them, but the direction is clear: notification batching is leaving UX handbooks and moving into the operating system.

Apple: the mail badge counts only what matters

On the iPhone front, the move that pleased me most concerns the counter itself. With iOS 18.2, the Mail app introduced categories and, when they are on, the badge on the icon shows only unread messages in the Primary inbox: newsletters, receipts and deals stop inflating the number. Anyone who prefers the full count has to go looking for it in settings, which flips the previous logic.

Then there is Reduce Interruptions, a Focus mode powered by Apple Intelligence that weighs the content of each alert and lets through only those it deems urgent, alongside summaries that condense conversations into a few lines. Here, though, silence is entrusted to an algorithm, and trust has to be earned: a single important message lost in limbo is enough to bring back the temptation to switch everything on again.

Instagram and sleep mode switched on for teens

Meta, too, has bet on starting settings. Since September 2024, Instagram Teen Accounts have sleep mode on from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.: notifications are muted and direct messages get an automatic reply. Users under 16 need a parent’s permission to turn it off. The choice came under regulatory and media pressure, and it is limited to minors, but it shows that shipping with alerts off is possible, even for a company that lives on attention.

Notification batching: what the research says

The grouping route also rests on experimental ground. In 2019, a team led by Nicholas Fitz and Kostadin Kushlev, with Dan Ariely among the authors, published a two-week experiment in Computers in Human Behavior: people who received their alerts in three daily batches reported less phone-related stress, better concentration, a stronger sense of productivity and more control over their device than those who got them in real time. Anxiety, on the other hand, did not drop significantly, a sign that batched delivery helps but cannot fix everything alone.

This ties in with what emerged in Personalization is tiring: every choice an interface offloads onto its users, including deciding which ping to look at right away, drains energy.

The Digital Fairness Act and addictive design

The next step might come from Brussels. The Digital Fairness Act, the European Commission proposal expected by the end of 2026, should tackle dark patterns, unfair personalization and addictive design, following up on the resolution in which the European Parliament, in December 2023, called for rules against interfaces built to keep people hooked. If relentless alerts fall within its scope, quiet will stop being a courtesy offered by a few and become an obligation for everyone.

Why dead calm makes me happy

I’m glad about this shift, and not only because of my little red dot. An interface that stays silent until it has something relevant to say respects people’s time and gives value back to the few messages that do arrive: when a notification becomes rare, it starts meaning something again. For those of us who work with content, the bar rises too, because every word in an alert has to earn the space it takes up. In the meantime, I keep defending my spotless screen with stubborn care, waiting for the day silence becomes the factory setting.

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Chiara Bonifazi