Designing Notifications
Your client says, “Notifications are cool. We want notifications. We want our customers to click, and we want to measure it and show it off to the board of directors and dance around in animal skins while nymphs scatter flower petals through the air.”
I have worked on a handful of UX projects where this scenario has happened, and after plenty of unfocused sketching and roundabout conversations – I have developed… A SYSTEM. You know, break down in order to rock out.
These are six questions you should address in order to create a system of notifications:
1. What are you notifying people about?
Let’s say you are working on an entertainment news site that aggregates stories that have to do with cats. (Internet cliché!) You pull in featured stories about cat shows, pictures of cats eating pasta, political pieces about funding cat shelters, ect. Are you notifying people about every new story? Are you allowing people to select the types of stories they like and notifying them about updates in their favorite categories? Are you gently reminding them every so often that something is trending? Are you letting friends share with friends? What is actually pleasant, useful or enjoyable for your cat enthusiasts?
2. How are you notifying them?
Are you using the popular red circle with a number in it? Email notifications? A text alert at the top of a content stream? Push notifications? Little flags? What are all of your options and how do these channels work together? Does your cat channel require notifications settings?
3. What happens when your customers click on the notification?
Is there enough info within the email? Do notifications have their own page? Is there a popover list? Are notifications integrated into a main menu? Can you easily clear all notifications?
4. In this system you are devising, what does an average customer experience look like? What is the upward limit of notifications that can occur? What is the lower limit?
This part is important. No one wants 3745 new messages. Too many red dots is stressful. If your updates are inconsequential, for example, three new videos of cats in sprinklers – don’t make users click each one to clear their notification number. If your updates are crucial to the lively hood of your customers, like a reminder to pay your cell phone bill or we are turning it off, you probably want to force them to click through before the notification disappears. This can be tricky, especially if your product is at all social. How important is a gif sent by your boss? Does that fall under inconsequential or crucial? My recommendation is to play out every single possible scenario you can think of and find patterns.
5. Copy.
Favorite. Follow. Quick List. Notifications. Like. Message. Update. News. Bookmark.
It depends what you are doing. Try to be semantic. Fail Trap: Don’t fall into overthinking it and try to come up with something fancy that no one understands like “You have three new diamonds.”
6. How are you going to measure this in order to tweak it quickly?
Track clicks, drop offs, engagement, ect. If there are notifications settings, do people adjust them? It’s pretty easy and useful to focus on qualitative research too. Just ask users without being annoying about it. Plan on adjusting your plan. Being reactive is more logical than claiming to always guess right. Schedule time or a meeting to evaluate your notification ecosystem after the first day it is implemented. Do it again after the third day. Evaluate it every week.
That’s about it! You are now free to go home and watch Mad Men and eat fro-yo while your customers get notified appropriately and your clients shop online for animal skins to dance around in because they truly believe in an alternate reality.
