Grades must be user-adjustable

What it is

The system's urgency grade is a guess about a generic recipient. The real loss function sits with the person who receives it: "shipped" is noise to someone who tracks parcels in an app, and must-hear to someone waiting at the door. Adjustable grading means a type, a sender, or a thread can be moved up or down without killing the whole channel.

This is about changing the tier of types already being sent. It is not whether to subscribe to a type, and not the operating system's one-time permission switch.

Why it happens

Default matrices cut on event type and miss situation: jet lag, on-call, childcare, an exam in progress. The crude fixes for a wrong tier are tolerate or disable. Disable is irreversible information loss; tolerate is ongoing wrong interrupts. Adjustable tiers split an all-or-nothing decision into "this class goes quiet, that person keeps the banner."

The control has to act on something the person can point to. A global "importance" slider with no object makes the next arrival a lottery. Per-item labeling becomes sorting labor. The objects that work are usually sender, thread, and the product's existing content types—change the tier there, and the next similar arrival is predictable.

Studying it

Give a set with default tiers; let half the group retier, the other half only toggle on/off. Compare later whole-channel disable, complaints about wrong tiers, and whether retiering is stable (flip-backs mean the control is unintelligible).

Independent variables: grain of the object (global / type / sender), whether the control lives on the notification or only in settings, initial mismatch between default and user ranking. Dependent variables: whole-channel disable rate, retier count vs rollback count, later open rate of demoted types.

Lab prompts to "set this how you like" overstate willingness. Real retiering happens at the moment of annoyance; if the control is not there, the measurement is "could not find it," not "did not want it."

Where it stops holding

Safety, payment, and legally required delivery should not be tunable all the way to silence without a remaining visible record; otherwise adjustability becomes evasion. On shared terminals and supervised accounts, the admin—not the current operator—may own the control. When types are renamed or merged, old mappings must inherit or prompt a re-choice; silent drops zero out the user's work.

Applying it

• Put "interrupt less / interrupt more for this" on the notification; the object name must match the settings page.
• Demotion must not silently disable the whole app; promotion must not drag marketing into the sound channel.
• List overridden objects and their current tiers in settings, with restore-to-default, so a messy configuration is reversible.
• Verify with ten deliberately mis-tiered items (low consequence as banners, high consequence as silent). See whether people correct the object within two items, and whether the next similar arrival follows the new tier. Whole-app disable means the control failed.

Related

• Within the group: H5.01.1 Grade urgency by consequence and how soon it lands · H5.01.2 If everything is high priority, nothing is
• Adjacent: H5.09 Category subscriptions · H5.03 Do not disturb and focus · H4.05 Notification permission
• Search terms: user-adjustable priority · per-sender importance · notification tier