Alex Faaborg looks at the cost of notification in browsers. I personally dislike the constant updates and the check to update plugins. When I start a browser my goal is to have that browser up and running so that I can look at a website. I don't open a browser to have an update, I open a browser to look at the web. The updates get in the way of that and I don't care enough about security to be patient enough to have updates and plugin checks. Faaborg notes that the user's goal and the designers goal are often at odds in this area:

These types of escalating levels of notification can all work to capture the user's attention, but is there a downside? Often when designing a feature we can be overly focused on what the feature is about, instead of looking at the much larger picture of what the user is thinking and doing.

Users are exceptionally fickle and impatient - and rightly so - companies and designers have a habit of stuffing dialogs, information and halts in a user's workflow down the user's throats.

A good example is recently I bought a calling card to phone overseas. When I dialed the number it spent the first forty seconds telling me that the provider I was using had changed from so-and-so to so-and-so. I did not care. In fact I less than cared. I wanted to make a call overseas and instead I had to listen to something I was uninterested in before i could actually do the task I wanted - dial overseas.