When did “disturb” became the default mode?

Some of that just sounds like incompetent design, like how the designer didn't consider the UX of reverting to its previous DND schedule when your temporary DND mode turns off.

Though, perhaps you explained it poorly, what's wrong with it turning off DND mode when your 1hr DND timer expires? What else is the point of the timer?

Does that smartwatch not let you toggle DND off until you decide to toggle it back on? Is there no silent mode?

I keep my iPhone on silent-mode almost permanently. Maybe it's time to try any of the other brands with this elementary feature?

But to answer your question, people generally want to be disturbed by notifications. Just consider how many people don't keep their phone in silent mode. I don't think it's the ideal way to live, but people love running over to their phone to see if it's a new WhatsApp message that cause the ping. Certainly my girlfriend and roommates and all the people I hear day to day who have notification sounds turned on when there's a physical switch on the device to turn them off.

Still, a silent-mode switch already gives you your dream of "I want to opt-in to being disturbed". Apparently every smartwatch except your Xiaomi watch has it. Time to switch.

> what's wrong with it turning off DND mode when your 1hr DND timer expires? What else is the point of the timer?

What I think is wrong is the default being "DND off". I mean, I wished it went back to the previous mode, which was the scheduled DND, but I understand if after the timer the device goes into "default" mode. The piece I don't get is "DND off" being the default mode, as if I was looking forward to be disturbed. Especially if this device in particular knows when I'm sleeping, and there's a mode that is pretty much "DND if I'm sleeping". Maybe I'm looking forward to getting notifications, but who thought I would also be looking forward to be awaken to get them?

> Does that smartwatch not let you toggle DND off until you decide to toggle it back on? Is there no silent mode?

Yes, the silent mode is just DND, it doesn't have sleep mode, or airplane mode, just the DND.

> But to answer your question, people generally want to be disturbed by notifications.

That might be true, and it also might be the reason for "disturb" being the default mode. It's beyond my comprehension, but it wouldn't be the first time when the general public has a different opinion than mine.

And this also brings something up. People generally want to be disturbed by notifications, and *potentially disturb anybody else in the process*. I mean, I wish I didn't have to endure all the buzzing/blinking/noise coming from devices nearby.

> What are the arguments that support this behaviour from a UX point of view?

Path dependence. That's all.

It used to be fine in the past. At the beginning of the smartphone era, there just weren't that many disruptions to warrant a DND mode. Most notifications were interesting. And we didn't have wearable devices tethered to phones or computers either. The normalization of distraction kind of got us by surprise, society-wide, and it's only now that new UX patterns are developing to help people manage it.

You are overthinking it. If you want good sleep, take tech out of your bedroom.

This is grossly oversimplified. You can have good sleep and have tech in the bedroom.

I've enjoyed not having to buy an alarm clock for many, many years. A phone allows me to change the noise I wake up to and set multiple alarms at random intervals. I now rarely sleep through the alarms - no more hoping that the alarm clock had a good noise and no more suddenly finding out I no longer wake to it (and yes, I sleep through them: They'd wake up others in the house. Yes, this is even with good sleep hygiene.)

Music comes from tech, too. This is especially helpful to cover up small noises in my house or the apartments around me: The small noises disturb me more when falling asleep than a radio/television going on. (The same has been true of studying: A quiet library is an experience of interruption. So. Many. Noises.)

I've lived more than one place where my tech had to be in my bedroom if I wanted any sort of privacy while using it.

Much better to be diligent about using it. It sucks that the poster seemed to be doing this, and I understand their complaint. It seems to me that it is a software oversight, but like they said, "disturb" is the norm, so we probably won't get real relief until standards change.

An Amazon Echo works great as an advanced alarm clock: the new editions have a visible clock that you can turn off at night, and you can listen to music or podcasts without having to reach to your phone.

Phones are noisy, and phones are distracting: how often do you need to quickly check the weather and instead you read your notifications? Keeping it in airplane mode at night is a big life improvement.

> Phones are noisy, and phones are distracting: how often do you need to quickly check the weather and instead you read your notifications? Keeping it in airplane mode at night is a big life improvement.

Agreed. Phones are noise and distracting. But those are not intrinsic qualities of phones. We have made phones that way, and we can made them any other way we want.

Other people talk about airplane mode. I kind of like it but I'd rather not be disturbed by default, so that wouldn't be necessary.

This is an example of differing wants and needs and personalities.

I have no desire for an echo, and I don't own visible clocks that aren't connected to devices (computer, tablet, phone, etc). Well, save one: An old alarm clock that runs backwards most of the time and has for years. My life only revolves around time when it improves my life - getting to places before they close, meeting with others, work.

I never really need to quickly check weather because it has little impact on my day. I only really need it to dress warm/cold enough when I'm out of the house. This time of year, there is snow, so I can just assume it is below freezing and not raining, and only need more than that if I plan on being outside more than my normal commutes.

I rarely check the time if I wake at night. I do tend to check when I wake up, but I rarely check notifications when I do. Little is so important that I can't check when I get around to it. If I need immediate action, someone will call. Most things aren't giving me notifications anyway because I make it so.

And besides, I can just turn it on silent if I don't want to hear the few notices I get.

Yea seriously. Just turn off you phone and get a 80s era alarm clock.

I switched to having only a single old phone with no apps and no sim on airplane mode as a clock in the bedroom. It makes it much easier to get going in the morning (as in a whole 30-40 minutes faster).

I have all my sounds and notifications disabled, and my phone is always on do not disturb. Family and close friends are the only ones who can get through the wall of silence and actually ring my phone. This works very well for me. It might take some adjusting, but being able to control bottom up attention signals so that they are meaningful again is surely worth it for many people.

Engagement!

What I do with my phone is turn off wifi and data so that in case of emergency someone could call (or text) me but anything internet-related is disabled.

Exactly. I enable Airplane Mode by default on my iPad too, except when i need to lookup something (and Do Not Disturb is enabled permanently anyway.)

I have never ever used push e-mail, because I'd hate it too if (paper)post delivery would come with a bang on the door every time there's a letter in the mailbox. So I have never ever been disturbed in my sleep for that reason. You people bring it upon yourselves, nuff said.

Phones are _designed_ to be addictive and attention seeking.

Personally I have had email alerts turned off for the last decade and I dont sleep with my phone- its the ultimate DND.

> What are the arguments that support this behaviour from a UX point of view?

I wish I could get an answer to this same question. I recently bought an Apple watch, mostly lured by the oximeter, and decided to wear it at night to monitor my sleep too, because after COVID I became a light sleeper.

It knows I'm sleeping, but the damn thing used to tick my wrist at 3 am to congratulate me about closing my movement circle, waking me up. It got better at staying quiet after a couple of weeks, but I had to manually configure a sleep schedule because it can't tell on its own. I blame imprecise machine learning.

I don't think manufacturers have anything to gain by disturbing you, it's just that phones have become increasingly needy on its own, because of all the notifications that we agreed to.

> This applies to my phone as well, which I always have with DND turned on.

Haha, same. I don't use the DND mode, I just leave vibrate on but no sound. Some people complain from time to time that they can't reach me but I figure if it's something important it will reach me eventually.

All these people saying "just don't have a phone in your bedroom" evidently don't work in the datacenter sphere, because if one of my sites has a problem and my boss can't reach me, I might as well be fired

Most people don't need to be on call. Personally, I don't want to turn on my laptop when I'm with my family (much less get up at night) just because some manager has had an 'incident'.

I hope you get appropriate compensation for being available round the clock.

You chose to be on-call. Presumably because the compensation made that worth it for you. But that's your doing.

I tried being on-call in my early 20s. Lasted a few months. Never. Again.

there is a difference being waken up by the thing you choose to be on-call for and being waken up in the middle of the night by a random application because fuck you that's why

Are you saying that your device doesn't let you silence application notifications? Which device is that so that I can stay far away?

All of these comments make my iPhone/AppleWatch sound like the only devices with a silent-mode and a DND-mode that work. That surely can't be true, so why are we pretending that these features don't exist? If you're getting woken up by app notifications in 2021, it's time to RTFM.

> Are you saying that your device doesn't let you silence application notifications?

It does, but I assumed the DND mode was back to the scheduled mode. I also was _completely sure_ that I had set everything up so, under no circumstance, I was going to be awaken in the middle of the night –spoiler: I was wrong–.

> If you're getting woken up by app notifications in 2021, it's time to RTFM

Yes and no. - Yes, maybe I should have read the manual, that's right. It was also probably not worth the time spent reading it because: 1. It might not even mention the behaviour of the DND mode after the "DND for 1 hour" finishes. 2. Even if it did mention it, I'd rather be awaken once than spend hours reading mostly useless stuff. - No, in 2021 there shouldn't be an app/device waking me up unless I explicitly allowed it to happen. Especially if the device *knows I'm sleeping*.

This sounds more like the implementation of the dnd timer

When you create a timer for a mode, the most straight forward implementation is to exit that mode when time is up, not to cache what the previous mode was and check if other systems have ownership of that mode.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you set a dnd timer for one hour at 8am, dnd will be turned off at 8:30am.

Keeping track of who owns this setting is more difficult than just having each service switch the setting when they are told to.

I wondering if thats the default behaviour of users too. That they do prefer to reply to emails at 2 am. It's anecdotal, but in one engineering team I talked about having culture of not sending emails after work hours. But consensus was that they have no problem with it, and some insisted that they are any way working late in nigt. So, will-fully or forced, users are maybe performing this behaviour !

It's just idle use of my time. I remember answering some emails on the way back from the club sometimes. I'm tired, sure, but it's 4 a.m. and the drugs have worn off and now I'm just soberly going home in the back of an Uber. There's definitely enough memory access left in me to answer these questions and it's not like I can do anything else on the way back.

I guess then the Product Managers of these companies are building correctly for their user base.

For context, are you in the US?

No, but the culture is mostly acquired from there.

Well, back in my day, landlines were plugged in 24/7 by default and could ring 24/7 by default.

But people generally had the good manners not to call in the middle of the night, unless it was an emergency.

Do people nowadays call others in the middle of the night?

I know it will not work for everyone but I've setup alerts so almost nothing makes a sound on the phone, even with DnD off.

I really haven't received any non-emergency calls at midnight for years. App notifications, on the other hand..., uh.

I just set my phone to DnD with calls allowed and notifications silenced, and it works wonders. Maybe it should be the default?

That's exactly what I think. I shouldn't have to be configuring stuff to not be disturbed. That should be the default. Then let me configure under what circumstances I want to waken up, like this person is calling, the server went down, etc.

Maybe that's what designers/developers should consider when working on notifications: this notification will potentially wake up someone, let's not do it unless they explicitly asked us to wake them up if this happened.

Yep, someone designed my phone to vibrate if it runs out of battery and needs to shut down. Wonderful in the middle of the night. No way to disable it.

Haha hilarious. I'm sorry about it, but this is a great example of what I'm talking about

Generally no. But we had former presidents that tweet at 3am, does that count?

Some people are just set up differently. I have to mute my phone at night because of this with one person in mind. I tend to do that anyway but there are certain people I'd like to be able to contact me then if there's an emergency. Unfortunately there isn't a straightforward way to allow just them to cause ringng on my phone either.

This person just doesn't get it either. When we were in school they'd walk into my dorm room at about 3 in the morning too if I didn't lock it

The friendly people from Windows Technical Department keep calling me at various times of the day and night to tell me about the malware I supposedly have on my computer. I now ignore all calls unless I know the number or am expecting a call from a doctor or similar.

Yeah, but if you called after 9pm you had to have a damn good reason or you’d get a lecture about “what hour it is”.

My father had a different dictionary if the reason was not damn good, like some one in medical emergency.

My theory would be that that:

* "disturbable by default" is a carry-over from landline-only time

* calls where rarer in landline-only time because they (sometimes) cost _money_

* calls where rarer in particular times (eg late at night) because of a social norm

* calls in the middle of the day where probably rarer, but also much easier to ignore because you were not at home and your phone simply run in the void

* calls were mostly done by human beings

Now, the "phone calls from a human being who respects social norms or that I simply never hear" have been replaced by "automated notifications from bots in a piece of plastic that's constantly in my pocket, or text messages from people that expects me to be reachable at any time."

So, I would argue that "disturb" was always the default mode, but the disturbance is now high enough that we might want to reconsider.

Although, the old rules like "don't call me after 11pm unless it's an emergency" would be hard to translate to "don't text me after 11pm unless it's an emergency even though it's currently our only way to communicate because lockdown" ;)

Also 'long distance' was a cost that minimized the blast radius of callers. They also couldn't buy targeted call lists which I presume exist now with low cost and effort.

Why not shut off your phone if you don't want to be disturbed? I have mine on as anyone who would call me at 3 AM I want to disturb me.

The alarm doesn't work if the phone is off.

I usually use an awfully basic Casio wristwatch on my nightstand as an alarm. 5€ at a random chinese seller. 3€ Battery lasts 2 years. Job done, move on.

If you need to use a smartphone, at least keep it in airplane mode, even if only to avoid eating radiations 8hr every night.

I've used a lot of alarms over the years - I sleep through them, get used to the sounds, and so on. Phones aren't foolproof - i've slept through 17 phone calls in a row.

It has been so bad that I was afraid to live alone because I thought I would get fired for being late.

Solved with a phone.

But it will in airplane mode.

Airplane mode doesn't allow for calls to come through, if necessary: Silent will allow it to ring if the same number calls more than once in a row.

iPhones will switch themselves on to sound the alarm.

I've never had an iphone to experience it: I'd honestly take that as another reason not to have one. I'd rather a phone be off when I turn it off. Silent mode works well.

Phones have a silent-mode switch. This is a solved problem.

Yes, and I've used it!

The alarm is one of the reasons as Broken_Hippo mentions.

However my concern has more to do with the current state of things rather than the solution for this particular problem. I mean, how is it that I have to go and turn off the phone? shouldn't the phone –apps/devices/etc– try to be less disturbing?

Use a seperate device (e.g. old iPod Touch) for alarm clock and music player.

Then keep the phone somewhere you can't hear it at all.

I obviously charge my phone outside of the bedroom.

I have a wifi connected tablet for listening to audiobooks, porno stuff like that.