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I have the Fidelity app installed on my phone, and 5 minutes after I leave my phone, I get this push notification—

Fidelity: For your security, you have been logged out due to 5 minutes of inactivity.

Is there any purpose to show this message to the user? I often find it invasive and annoying; I will be in the middle of the task and my phone will vibrate letting me know that I've been logged out. The app also outputs helpful notifications, so I can't turn them off.

Are there any positives to messages like this one? Does such a message make the user feel more comfortable thinking that their account is more secure? Does it make people more willing to log in each time if it tells them it's for security?

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  • This would be frustrating to me and I would turn it off.
    – scunliffe
    Feb 12, 2016 at 23:15

2 Answers 2

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I suppose the company has done its fair share of research as well as user testing before blasting out this form of notification. Perhaps it gave some user a sense of security, after all you are dealing with financial data.

Another reason could be that they want to cultivate good habits from the user to log out from the app themselves, hopefully after repeated reminders.

It would be nice if they keep a separate notification for "reminders".

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  • Agreed this would be why they're doing it. Although perhaps they could add a subtle hint at the end to incentivise users. So that it reads something like: "For your security, you have been logged out due to 5 minutes of inactivity. To avoid seeing this message in future, and for your added security, please log yourself out when you've finished using the app."
    – Monomeeth
    Feb 12, 2016 at 6:12
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If you are in the app at the time it is then contextually relevant as it alerts the user to a change in state and to a change in expected behaviour. However, if this is a push notification that happens at an OS level, when you are not actively in the app, then it interferes with your current interactions on your phone and adds no contextual value. If this is the case then it would be more contextual, timely and unobtrusive to alert you to your logged out state when you next interact with the app again, and further, it should offer to log you back in within a safe time limit

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