Doodle-oop! It was that batscope time of the night when, if you wake up and can’t get back to sleep, you face your death. I was sleeping in a sleeping bag (or half out of one, it was hot) on the floor in front of the upstairs front window at Houghton Lake. Doodle-oop! WHAT the HECK? I groped for my phone. About the only time my phone goes doodle-oop at that batscope time of night is when somebody texts me that they’ve landed somewhere. When I am doodle-ooped, I fumble groggily for my phone, reply “xo” or “<3”, and fall back to sleep. One time I received a “just landed in sf, xo” doodle-oop. I replied “xo”, or so I thought. The next morning, I discovered that my loverly phone had autocorrected “xo” to “so”, which could easily be interpreted as “so what”. Don’tcha love autocorrect? (Actually, I do! My phone guesses when I’m spelling things like “moominbeach” and “expotition” but I guess that would be a whole ‘nother entry.)

But nobody was flying anywhere when the doodle-oop came in at that particular batscope time, aka three AM Saturday morning. So. Who was texting me? And why? I found my phone and it was a FACEBOOK message letting me know that somebody had commented on something. Did I CARE about that comment? I probably did! But not at three AM. Doodle-oop. Doodle-oop. Doodle-oop. Doodle-oop. Doodle-oop. Doodle-oop. It’s three in the morning and I am going to diiiiiie. Someday.

I had been getting these text messages or whatever they are from Facebook for about a week. My FB iPhone app errored (errorred?) out a while back and I deleted it and re-downloaded it. And then. Doodle-oop. Doodle-oop. Doodle-oop. Why am I getting these messages all of a sudden and how the HECK do I turn them off? I looked around in my Facebook account settings. Nothing useful. I tried “Help”. “Help” on most websites is not very helpful but what the heck? Actually, help looked promising this time. It told me to text the message “off” to FBOOK (the numeric equivalent of it anyway). So I did. And, voila! I got a confirmation message and I didn’t get any more of those stoopid text messages. Until that batscope hour of the morning last Saturday. What the…?

The next day, I was randomly fooling around with the settings on my phone aaaaannnnnd, I noticed a category called “Notifications”. I touched “Notifications” and I got the screen in the photoooo there. Hmmm… Facebook is one of the items in this category. I touched “Facebook” and turned everything on the next screen to “OFF”! Voila! No more text messages push notifications! This time for real. Who’da thunk to look at the PHONE settings?

I can’t exactly call myself an expert in web usability. Although I have studied it and worked in the field for years now, web usability is a slippery aminal. Hardware and browsing agents are constantly changing and it can be hard to keep up. But that is why a good web designer doesn’t hide things from people. Especially things that ANNOY THE HECK OUT OF PEOPLE! Who on earth at Facebook thought that it would be a good idea to install push notifications in the latest iPhone app update and not give people an EASILY LOCATABLE out? Last I knew, it seemed that old bags like meeeee are the fastest growing Facebook demographic. Believe me, we do need our beauty sleep. Not to mention that we all too often wake up all on our own at that batscope time of the night. It’s when we face the fact that we are gonna die. And you will one day do that too, oh young and fair-of-face Facebook designers.

Good night,
Kayak Woman

This entry was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.