LG: So you were designing just for the Sidekick's little screen?

MD: For that tiny screen … Actually we started designing for this guy here. [Duarte holds up a small mobile device.] This is what we affectionately called the Peanut. It looks like one of those peanut cookies. This was basically a pager. That's how you can think of it, except that it had a screen where we could show graphics and icons on it. This was the original product that we were going to make, although eventually we ended up making the Sidekick, which allowed you to communicate two ways just like you do today. And it had a keyboard.

The keyboard was the main appeal, and this meant that not only could you do emails like you would on a BlackBerry and type in your web pages faster, but you could text message. Not just SMS, but on what at the time was the hotness, which was AOL Instant Messenger. There was also MSN, ICQ. We had all of these on this guy here. In fact, we had the first mobile app store on the Sidekick.

LG: And this is a time before social media is really anything close to what it is now.

MD: Oh, there was no social media at the time ... There were blogs.

LG: This was even before MySpace.

MD: This was the beginning of MySpace, the beginning of LiveJournal, that kind of thing, which is where this wonderful chart comes in [pulls out a paper chart]. Because part of the process of design is always understanding the problem space before you come up with a solution. And back then we did this analysis around what we called “content frequency.” We didn't even have a name of notifications or interruptions. Maybe, if we talked about them, we would talk about “alerts.” Although later you'll notice here in the instructions for what we actually published, we ended up calling them new message notifications, communication services, and notifications.

LG: Would you say that your team created the term "notifications"?

MD: I don't think so. It must've been in use by the cell phone operators. This might've been a term that came up when we were working with T-Mobile.

LG: How did you decide what was higher priority? Why did people need to be urgently notified of something?

"People are using more technology in different ways, much more intimately throughout all aspects of their lives. And we just need to invent new technologies and invent new social conventions to deal with that." Matías Duarte

MD: At the time, the only kind of message you would get would be SMS, or a missed call, or a voicemail. For this, we wanted to receive all sorts of different types of notifications because we wanted you to download apps. And so we had to come up with a system for notifying you about them and telling you about them and managing them because we couldn't just have a whole bunch of individual indicator lights. You'd run out of room.

We started with this analysis here, which is why I brought up this table, and we talked about how frequently folks would want to learn about something, and what type of information it was. See, we didn't even call it social media, we called it “web diaries.” “News” here is something we thought people might want to hear about on a six-hourly basis.

LG: That would be lovely.

MD: Yeah. Email was once an hour. And there was some stuff we were certain folks would never want a notification of. Like games.

Duarte continues to show early smartphone notification types that include “Greeting Cards,” “Personal Organizer,” “Coupons,” “Stock Tracking,” and “Messaging,” with a large emphasis on messaging notifications. At some point, the Danger team decided to open up the platform to outside app markers, so that they could “define their own custom icon and offer a little preview payload” of a message.

LG: As the platform creators, did you still control the notifications or did you just give the developers free rein?

MD: Well, we didn't control the payload of the notification at all. We gave the creators that free rein ... We were so excited about being helpful to people and helping connect them and helping them choose whichever type of application they wanted, whether an MSN user or an ICQ user. You get the messages, you know exactly who they're from, you can see what the message is going to be before you jump in there to respond to it.