We’ve all been there: we’re in a meeting or in a quiet, crowded place and our iPhone awkwardly rings, blaring across the room like a car horn. Yet still, many of us are apprehensive about turn off audio alerts for fear we miss an important message. But there is another option: setting your iPhone to vibrate instead. Here’s what you need to know.

Ever since the first iPhone came out, it’s had a built-in motor that lets the iPhone vibrate when certain types of notifications come in. Once such notification: the phone call. By default, the iPhone will ring when you get a phone call, which, as mentioned above, isn’t always ideal–especially if you’re somewhere where silence is appreciated.

That’s where vibration mode comes in. This means your iPhone will vibrate when you get specific notifications. What’s nice about this is that a sound alert or a vibration alert isn’t an either-or scenario. You can have your iPhone both provide a sound alert and vibrate at the same time when you get a notification, or simply choose one or the other.

Of course, while many people won’t want to turn off audio alerts (by flipping the physical switch on the side of the iPhone to set it to “silent” mode the whole time, for some users vibration mode is the only mode that matters. I’m speaking about users who are deaf or hard of hearing. This is why vibration mode is considered an accessibility feature, too.

Putting your iPhone on vibrate is really easy. Here’s what you need to do:

It should be noted that if you set both tootles to OFF (white) your iPhone will never vibrate.

What’s really cool about the iPhone is that you can change the type of vibrations you feel for different types of alerts. For example, you can set your iPhone so that when you get a text you feel a series of three short vibrations, and when you get a call you feel two long vibrations.

Different vibration types allow you to know what type of notification the vibration is alerting you to without even looking at your phone. How it feels tells you what it is.

To set other vibrations on the iPhone:

Yes, you can also create custom vibration patterns for the iPhone! Custom vibrations can be anything you want them to be: short taps, long taps, fast, slow, or a combination of all the above. This really lets you give your iPhone vibration capabilities a unique touch, quite literally.

To create and set other vibrations on the iPhone: