Alert fatigue, or alarm fatigue, was originally coined in the healthcare sector to describe the desensitization that occurs in individuals exposed to an excessively large number of frequent alarms (for example, from patient monitors). With 18 billion SMS messages, 100 billion direct WhatsApp messages, and 306.4 billion emails sent daily, it’s easy to see the relevance of alert fatigue in the world of notifications. Users can quickly become desensitized to the plethora of email, push, in-app, SMS, and direct messages they receive daily. Constant alerts from these various sources contribute to user desensitization and operational fatigue, making it harder for important notifications to stand out.
Here are some interesting numbers: On average, people in the U.S. check their mobile phones once every 10 minutes; 95% of new app users will churn within the first 90 days if they don’t receive any notifications; and between 61% and 78% of people, depending on generation, delete apps that send them too many unnecessary notifications. These figures show that while users expect, and even demand notifications, there is a fine line between sending too many and too few alerts. A well-designed alert system is crucial for managing notification volume and maintaining user engagement. Alert systems in different industries, such as healthcare and cybersecurity, face similar challenges in managing alert fatigue and ensuring that critical information is not overlooked.
Breaking through the inevitable alert fatigue to give your notifications a chance among the congested world of pings, vibrations, and pop-ups competing for their attention requires a strategy that prioritizes timely, personalized, and actionable alerts. Alert fatigue in cybersecurity is a significant challenge due to the high volume of security notifications, making effective alert systems essential for maintaining organizational security and staff effectiveness.
Introduction to Alert Fatigue
Alert fatigue is a growing challenge that affects organizations across industries such as healthcare, cybersecurity, and finance. As the number of notifications, alarms, and security alerts continues to rise, individuals and teams can become desensitized to the constant stream of information—a phenomenon also known as alarm fatigue or notification fatigue. This desensitization leads to delayed responses, missed critical alerts, and, ultimately, a higher risk of security breaches and data breaches. In cybersecurity, alert fatigue can undermine an organization’s security posture, making it harder to identify and respond to critical threats in a timely manner. To combat alert fatigue, it’s essential to understand what causes it, how it impacts user behavior and business outcomes, and what strategies can be used to reduce its effects. By addressing alert fatigue head-on, organizations can ensure that critical alerts receive the immediate attention they deserve, reducing the risk of missed critical alerts and strengthening overall security.
Causes of Alert Fatigue
The root cause of alert fatigue is the overwhelming volume of alerts generated by security tools, monitoring systems, and other digital platforms. Security professionals are often inundated with numerous alerts, many of which are redundant or triggered by false positives. Poorly configured alert settings can further exacerbate the problem, causing non-actionable or irrelevant alerts to flood inboxes and dashboards. The lack of centralized visibility—where alerts are scattered across multiple systems—makes it even harder to manage and prioritize critical threats. As a result, security teams may struggle to distinguish between genuine threats and noise, leading to alert fatigue and a diminished ability to respond effectively. To reduce alert fatigue, organizations must streamline alert management, eliminate unnecessary and duplicate alerts, and ensure that only the most relevant and actionable notifications reach their teams.
Alert fatigue reduces user engagement and retention
A user’s natural reaction when feeling overwhelmed by notifications is to implement steps to take back control. If your users perceive that they are receiving excessive notifications that don’t add value, hinder productivity, and contribute to alert fatigue, especially from low priority alerts, non actionable alerts, and non critical alerts, the likelihood that they unsubscribe from your notifications—or even delete your app—in the detox process is high.
Reacting to every alert, vibration, and ping limits one’s ability to focus and complete solitary tasks that require sustained cognitive thinking. This switching between tasks, even if only determining whether or not to respond to a notification immediately, can result in a 40% productivity loss. And, as this article from Trello—a company that focuses on productivity—suggests, “it may take you as long as half an hour to get back into focus mode.”
With so many apps and services demanding attention, the risk of users experiencing alert fatigue is ever increasing. The almost constant pings, pop-ups, vibrations, and tones—including noisy alerts—can result in sensory overload. Sensory overload, in turn, can lead to stress (and other health disorders). The first implication is desensitization, which results in longer response times, missing important alerts, or outright ignoring notifications. When users are overwhelmed by too many notifications, missed alerts can occur, leading to unaddressed issues or overlooked critical information. But as the user feels increasingly overwhelmed, they will start to implement measures to correct their imbalance.
Alert fatigue is a real problem to the extent that the internet is full of advice on how users can “unplug, find space, and fight technology addiction,” “why you should turn off all your app notifications,” and how notifications are “destroying your productivity.”
Simple steps to take back control can range from instituting time management rules—setting defined times for attending to notifications—to unsubscribing from alerts deemed less valuable. But setting limits can be hard since reacting to notifications is psychologically addictive. Out of desperation and the inability to limit behavior, users just delete the app altogether. Or, on the extreme end, they systematically clean house. It takes time to configure alerts: what results in a pop-up, a ping, or a vibration, and what doesn’t. What appears on your laptop, your mobile phone, or connects through to your smartwatch. Which alerts should come through at which times and which should be silenced at night. Managing notification settings is further complicated by redundant alerts and multiple alerts from different apps or channels, making it more often than not far easier to start culling alerts one app at a time.
The impact of alert fatigue on business
Alert fatigue doesn’t just affect individual users—it can have far-reaching consequences for businesses as a whole. When security professionals are overwhelmed by too many alerts, the likelihood of delayed responses to critical threats increases, raising the risk of missed incidents and costly data breaches. The financial impact can be staggering, with the average cost of a data breach ranging from $3.86 million to $4.24 million. Beyond the monetary loss, alert fatigue can lead to decreased job satisfaction and higher turnover rates among security professionals, as constant exposure to non-critical notifications and missed incidents erodes morale and productivity. To protect both their bottom line and their teams, organizations must take proactive steps to reduce alert fatigue and ensure that critical issues are addressed promptly.
Minimize alert fatigue with a responsible notification strategy
While you alone can’t prevent alert fatigue among your users, you can implement steps to increase the survival rate of your notifications and app. The critical component to getting your notifications to stand out from all the rest is building trust in your brand and confidence in the information you communicate. You create this trust by making sure your notifications always positively contribute to the overall user experience. If your notifications improve productivity, help your users accomplish their goals, and provide value, they will become an indispensable component of the app experience. A responsible notification strategy minimizes alert fatigue and reduces alert fatigue for users by ensuring that only the most relevant and necessary messages are delivered.
There are three simple ways to create a well-defined and responsible notification that adds value and builds trust: Make them timely, personal, and actionable. Additionally, prioritize alerts and ensure that only legitimate warnings are sent to users, so they can focus on what truly matters without being overwhelmed by unnecessary notifications.
Ongoing efforts in mitigating alert fatigue are essential, and it is important to prioritize alerts based on user needs and urgency to maintain an effective and trusted notification system.
Ensure your critical alerts are timely
Timely means sending notifications that relate directly to the actions a user is currently performing or needs to perform in your app (and not sending your alerts in the middle of the night and being cognizant of your user’s time zone). Consider, for example, the perfect timeliness of a notification that your pizza delivery will be arriving at your front door in two minutes.
Since mobile devices are attention-disrupting by their nature and notifications tend to create a sense of urgency, avoid annoying your users by ensuring your notifications are always timely.
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Consider the urgency of the alert and be respectful of your user’s time. Don’t send multiple push notifications for a single message, as generating multiple alerts for the same event can overwhelm users, reduce the effectiveness of notifications, and lead to alert fatigue. In such cases, one longer-form email would be better suited.
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Don’t broadcast the same notification across multiple channels; rather, pick the channel most appropriate to the content and importance of the information being communicated.
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Analyze your user’s past behavior to select that time when, historically, they are more likely to engage with your app, especially for notifications that don’t require immediate action.
Personalize your notifications
Personalized notifications speak directly to the recipient. They are a one-to-one match to a user's unique needs rather than generic one-to-many segmentations and correlations. As a result, they provide a more genuine experience, demonstrating a fundamental understanding of your user as an individual. The benefit of personalization is tangible; according to McKinsey & Company, “today's personalization leaders have found proven ways to drive 5% to 15% increases in revenue.”
Remember, you're sending your notifications to an individual, not a device.
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Segment your notifications to make them relevant to your users and their preferences. More than just demographic segmentation, leverage the wealth of historic interaction within your app to tailor your notification content to each user.
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Implement a preference system within your app to put your users in control. It allows them to select what topics they want to hear more or less about. The more granular the level per channel the better, as this allows users to opt in or out of categories of notifications instead of an entire channel.
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Adapt your messages as your relationship changes with each user to keep them relevant and personal. A new user, for example, will derive far more value from a tips-and-tricks communication than an existing one who knows their way around your app.
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Use basic personalization like name, age, location, and sex if your app and data analytics are not mature enough for granular personalization or a self-selection preference system. This is a good place to start, as basic personalization can result in an almost 10% increase in open rates.
Make your notifications actionable
The intention of actionable notifications is to encourage users to engage with your app. More than just sharing valuable information, actionable notifications include a call to action that requires a response from the recipient. They build on the momentum of timely and personal to continue the journey in the app.
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Ensure the required actions justify the created disruptions; this increases the value users derive from your notifications. For example, think of the value of alerting a user to a document waiting on their review before it can proceed in the workflow. Avoid sending non critical alerts, as excessive less urgent notifications can lead to alert fatigue and reduce user trust.
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Create trust with your app and brand, build a stronger relationship with your users, and leverage actionable notifications.
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Consider the most appropriate channel suitable to the action required. Email is a good medium to share sensitive information or sensitive data that may need to be stored and referenced in the future. On the other hand, the real-time nature of in-app and push notifications are better suited to critical alerts that require immediate action.
Prioritize critical alerts
One of the most effective ways to combat alert fatigue is to prioritize critical alerts and filter out non-critical notifications. Security teams should focus their attention on high-priority alerts that signal genuine threats, while minimizing unnecessary notifications that contribute to the sheer volume of noise. Implementing risk-based alerting—where alerts are prioritized based on their potential impact and likelihood—can help ensure that the most urgent issues receive immediate attention. Setting appropriate alert thresholds and consolidating alerts from multiple sources can further reduce the number of alerts and prevent important information from being lost in the shuffle. By streamlining alert management and focusing on high priority alerts, organizations can minimize the risk of missed critical alerts and improve their overall security posture.
Education and training: Empowering users and teams
Empowering users and security teams through education and training is a crucial step in reducing alert fatigue and improving incident response. Regular training sessions, workshops, and awareness programs can equip security professionals with the skills needed to manage alerts effectively, prioritize critical threats, and leverage threat intelligence. By staying up to date on the latest vulnerabilities, alert management strategies, and incident response best practices, teams can better distinguish between actionable alerts and noise. Investing in ongoing education not only helps reduce alert fatigue, but also strengthens the organization’s security posture and ensures that security professionals are prepared to respond to emerging threats. By fostering a culture of continuous learning, organizations can mitigate the risks of alert fatigue and enhance their overall security operations.
Be part of the solution, not the problem
With the sheer number of apps installed on a user’s smartphone—80 on average, according to a BuildFire report—you alone can’t prevent alert fatigue. While it’s likely they aren’t all sending notifications, at least a good portion of the 30 apps the average user engages with monthly (or the nine daily) are. Add web push notifications, calendar reminders, and personal instant messaging apps, and it’s easy to understand how alert fatigue is a real problem.
With MagicBell, you can build a responsible and fully customizable notification experience that reduces alert fatigue by filtering unnecessary notifications. Much like security systems in other industries, effective alert management is crucial to ensure important information is not lost in the noise. MagicBell helps organizations respond to active threats, real threats, and security threats by ensuring critical notifications are never missed, which is essential to avoid significant risks. The platform can integrate with threat intelligence feeds to provide timely and relevant alerts, and can correlate alerts from the same IP address to streamline incident response. MagicBell supports security operations centers and cybersecurity professionals in managing alert volume, helping to prevent missed alerts and alert fatigue. A reliable alerting system is vital for organizations facing complex security challenges. Find out how to reduce unnecessary alerts and focus on value exchange by scheduling a demo today.