What Is Alert Fatigue?

Alert fatigue occurs when users become desensitized to notifications due to their high volume, leading them to ignore both trivial and critical alerts, a phenomenon initially identified in healthcare but prevalent across industries like DevOps and consumer products. This desensitization can result in reduced engagement, missed crucial information, and even users revoking notification permissions, all of which negatively impact business outcomes. To combat alert fatigue, strategies such as batching notifications, prioritizing their importance, allowing user control over preferences, routing alerts to appropriate channels, and optimizing the timing of notifications are recommended. These measures should aim to deliver fewer, more significant notifications that respect user attention and context, thus maintaining the efficacy and value of communication channels. Notification infrastructure platforms, like Courier, offer features that facilitate these strategies by providing tools for batching, prioritizing, and routing notifications, thereby helping to mitigate the adverse effects of alert fatigue without requiring custom development work.