Get off your lazy ass!

How to make users do stuff. To get them to check pending emails, comments, notifications?
My gmail has 150 unread mails. Now most of these are random mails which I don’t want to read. But still there is this momentary thought of marking them as read just to clean up my inbox. But the task of going through all the pages searching is a task I am not very fond of. So the task remains.
Similarly in facebook whenever a friend invites me for an app, a notification comes up. And the number of notifications which I haven’t checked has increased to quite a number. I noted today that facebook is taking a few number of tasks from the whole and showing them apart. These pictures will give a better idea.

And I realized how this is better than showing just “40 new notifications”, as I actually clicked on the smaller task. The comedy in this is both these links go to the same page even. Still people will click it. I think this is a lesson in human psychology.

3 Comments on “Get off your lazy ass!

  1. LOL, totally agreed , There should be a checkbox in front of it saying => mark them as notified :), though google gives a mark as read option but then u have to check every post

  2. In the Gmail search box you can put: “label:unread” to search all unread mails and then click “All” -> Mark as read.

    It is a bad habit though. You might accidentally skip over some important email. You should set up proper filtering in the first place. 🙂

    cheers
    nilesh

  3. that was helpful in context to gmail.
    the post is concerned mostly with social networking sites..where the site “wants” the users to check notifications.

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