Why KinHolo sends less than it could, and how quiet hours became a household setting rather than a personal one.
The number that scared us
Early in the tasks module we counted the notifications the app could send in an ordinary week for a household of five: reminders, completions, assignments, comments, acknowledgements, a rebalance suggestion. It came to forty-one. Every one of them was individually justified. Together they were a reason to uninstall.
Family software has a particular problem here. It is not one person’s tool, so a notification about one person’s task reaches the others. If the app is not careful, a busy household turns its own coordination into a stream of interruptions for everyone in it.
The rule we settled on
A person should hear from KinHolo when something needs them, at a time they can act on it, and otherwise once a day.
That breaks into a few decisions.
- Reminders are per member and per task. A reminder for your task reaches you, at the time you chose for it, and nobody else.
- Everything else goes into one morning digest. What was done yesterday, what is due today, what is waiting for you to decide. One notification, at a time the member picks, that reads like a note from a well-organised housemate rather than a log file.
- Quiet hours are respected without exception. A reminder due in quiet hours waits until they end. The only thing that ever interrupts quiet hours is nothing.
- Suggestions never arrive as alarms. A fair-load rebalance or an overspend heads-up is a gentle notice, sent once, escalated at most once, and never repeated after a person has seen it.
Why quiet hours are a household setting
We first built quiet hours as a personal preference. It seemed obvious: your phone, your hours. In testing it created an odd situation. One parent set quiet hours from nine, the other from ten, and for an hour every evening one of them was getting pinged about things the other could not see. The household’s rhythm was being split by a setting.
So quiet hours became a household setting, with a personal override. The household agrees when the day ends. A member who works nights can still set their own window. But the default is shared, because the evening is.
What the digest looks like
It is deliberately short. Tasks done, tasks due, decisions waiting. If a child completed a chore and it is waiting for a parent’s acknowledgement, that is in there. If a budget is on pace to run over by month end, that is in there, once, with the three things a person can do about it. If nothing happened, the digest does not go out at all, because “nothing happened” is not worth a notification.
What we will not build
We will not build streaks, because a streak is a notification that says you are failing. We will not build “your household was active” nudges, because the household knows. And we will not send a summary on Sunday evening, because we tried it, and it landed like a performance review.
The notifications module is next on the roadmap, and it is mostly the work of taking what the tasks and budget modules already do and making it the rule for every module that follows.
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