Record of Audio App Badge

The badge appeared on a Tuesday. It was a red circle with the number three inside it. Three things were unlistened.

The three things had been there for varying amounts of time. The newest was nine days old. The badge was new. The badge had not been there the previous Tuesday, which means either the badge was triggered by some event in the intervening period, or it had been there and had not been noticed, which amounts to the same outcome from the perspective of the person now looking at it.

What the Badge Represents

The badge does not tell you what is unlistened or why it arrived. It tells you that a number exists, and that the number is not zero. This is the complete information transfer.

The three things behind the badge are a conversation someone was added to without asking, a series someone subscribed to during a period of optimism about having more time to listen, and an episode of something that was good six months ago and may still be good or may have changed in ways that are only discoverable by listening.

The Social Function

The badge creates a mild obligation. It is mild because no one is watching. It is an obligation because the interface has designed a state in which the badge is visible and the zero-badge state is absent, and moving from the first to the second requires either listening or marking as listened, both of which require the phone to be opened and a decision to be made.

The phone was opened on Tuesday. The decision was to acknowledge the badge. The acknowledgment did not clear the badge.

The Reluctant Sympathy

The sympathy extended here is reluctant because the mechanism is understood. The badge exists to return the user to the application. The application has content the user presumably wants. The badge is the shortest path between the user and the content.

The content was there before the badge. The badge did not create the content. The badge created only the awareness that the content had been accumulating, which is a different kind of information from the content itself.

The Contradiction

Clearing a badge and addressing the content that caused it are different actions that the interface treats as equivalent. Marking three episodes as listened clears the badge. Listening to three episodes also clears the badge. The outcomes are identical from the perspective of anyone looking at the home screen.

They are not identical from the perspective of the person who subscribed to the series during the period of optimism about having more time to listen.

The Record

The badge was cleared on Wednesday. The content was not listened to. A new episode arrived Thursday. The badge returned.

The sympathy is extended anyway. The situation is not unusual.