User Problem

When receiving a notification for an alert, it presents you with four options. The first two being Ack and Close, without an arrow or ellipses to show that there are more options below. Any notification that is typically presented shows two options normally. So naturally one instantly looks and goes "Oh that close button is to close the notification". Turns out that is the close alert button.

Apple design doco guides developers that notifications are for the notification of events from inside your app to advise the user of something aka notify or drive them back in to the application to perform a function. The Opsgenie mobile app is not consistent with the second rule of this by offering users the options to handle alerts in the notification. While this is a great time saver instead of opening the app, it however leads to confusion about the role the word close plays in respect to the notification or the alert.

Suggested Solutions

Normally inside an Apple application you are presented with the destructive style for UIAlertButtons which tells the user that this is a destructive action such as closing a ticket.

The better solution would be to drive users to the application to complete the action of handling the alert and only present dismiss and open. This avoids any issues with accidental closes by the user by thinking they are closing the notification. Typically this should be that when you have a notification on the watch from the phone it will say open in … where selecting that causes the watch to show a black screen with “check your phone” where you get the full details about the notification .

Current Workarounds

Turn off Mirroring of alerts from the iPhone to Apple Watch, so notifications do not flow through to a non-iphone device.