Last night I was awaken by my Xiaomi Mi Band 5.<p>A few days ago I took a nap and set the DND –do not disturb– on a timer for 1h. Once the timer finished it went by default to "Turn off DND", which is the same as "disturb me please".<p>It's worth mentioning that before setting the DND for an hour, I had it one a schedule so it wouldn't disturb me from 10:30 pm to 8:30 am. It didn't go back to this one, it went to "disturb me please".<p>It's probably also worth mentioning that there is another mode called "Auto turn on", which detects when you're sleeping to avoid awakening you. Because this thing knows when I'm sleeping. But someone decided that the default should be to awaken someone if they receive an email at 2am.<p>So the thing that I bought precisely to improve my sleeping was designed to wake me up in the middle of the night.<p>Because of this I was wondering when did the "disturb" mode became the default? This applies to my phone as well, which I always have with DND turned on. How is it that we have to _turn on_ DND. Shouldn't it be "turn on disturb mode"?<p>What are the arguments that support this behaviour from a UX point of view?<p>-end of rant
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.<p>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?<p>Does that smartwatch not let you toggle DND off until you decide to toggle it back on? Is there no silent mode?<p>I keep my iPhone on silent-mode almost permanently. Maybe it's time to try any of the other brands with this elementary feature?<p>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.<p>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.
> <i>What are the arguments that support this behaviour from a UX point of view?</i><p>Path dependence. That's all.<p>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.
Engagement!<p>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.
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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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
This sounds more like the implementation of the dnd timer<p>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.<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if you set a dnd timer for one hour at 8am, dnd will be turned off at 8:30am.<p>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 !