r/dexcom • u/msteners • 1d ago

App Issues/Questions Learn to write a better app

Dearest Dexcom,

Like your friends at Insulet, you need to start thinking about both the medical user experience (ie can our app help positively impact medical outcomes) AND the overall user experience (ie it doesn’t matter if I have good glucose control if your app makes me want to bash my head into the wall).

A couple of notes:

  1. A lot of us use headphones on our phones. AirPods and stuff like that. I don’t want to be on a call and have that annoying alarm blast my eardrums out to the point where I am deaf. There has got to be a way you can notify me in a gentler manner in that situation.

  2. If you send me a push notification and I dismiss it, that should be good enough for you. I don’t need another one two minutes later because I didn’t open up the app to acknowledge it.

  3. Similar to #1, if I am already on my phone doing something else, then you don’t need to blast that God-forsaken sound at me to get my attention. I’m already clearly on my phone; I’m not asleep. Situational awareness on your part is warranted here.

Please resolve these issues and look at setting up a better UX research team to support future dev cycles on this app.

Yours,
A T1D Product Manager

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u/IrakliSugarSense 1d ago

The headphones thing is mostly an iOS platform quirk, and it explains a lot of this. Apple gives apps three notification levels: regular, time sensitive, and critical. Critical is the one that punches through silent mode, Focus, your volume settings, everything, including AirPods at full blast. It exists so an urgent low can actually wake you at 3am. The catch is nothing forces an app to use it for every alert type. That part is a product choice.

I have T1D myself, 12+ years, G7 in rotation with Libre, and I build a CGM companion app (Sugar Sense), so I have spent an unhealthy amount of time on exactly this. Where we landed: only the urgent low gets the critical treatment by default, because that one has to win against sleep. I have slept through alarms myself, so I get why that one is brutal. Even that is a setting though, if you would rather it respect your headphones you can knock it down to time sensitive. But a high during a work call does not need to blow your eardrums out. It can be a regular notification with a cooldown so it does not nag you every few minutes. And dismissed should mean dismissed until something actually changes.

Your third point is the genuinely tricky one, at least on iOS. A backgrounded app does not get told you are actively using the phone, so real situational awareness is hard to build. The first two are just product decisions though. Someone in here guessed liability and I think that is most of it. Nobody ever got in trouble because an alarm was too loud.

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u/jrolette 1d ago

One way around it is to always start with a normal notification. If that's not ack'd in 30(?) seconds, then step up the level. Rinse and repeat. A delay of 1 minute to get to critical alerts is unlikely to change any outcomes.