Make Notifications Great Again — The Inauguration.
Dear Reader,
Welcome to this post about notifications. It’s gonna be a great post, it’s gonna be absolutely fantastic! Notifications were meant to be the best channel to reach your user directly and give relevant info to them. The best one. Nothing else comes close. All other channels fail bigly. Total disasters. Email? Who uses it for re-engagement nowadays? It’s fake.
Over time, some really bad dudes have corrupted this channel and failed it miserably. This is a struggle for its survival and this is our last chance to defend it. In this agenda to get more users, they have done really terrible things. They are criminals!
This is a movement so we can have better notifications back. It is the future you deserve. I didn’t need to do this folks, believe me. I believe it is my turn to give back to the user experience that I love. Together, we’ll make notifications great again!
This is an attempt to a series of posts which will be about listing down my experiences, both good and bad, with the notifications in different apps and games. Notifications are a commonplace for re-engagement on any platform.
As the Android developers page explains it, A notification is a message you can display to the user outside of your application’s normal UI. When you tell the system to issue a notification, it first appears as an icon in the notification area. To see the details of the notification, the user opens the notification drawer.
Though the notifications work in slightly different ways on different platforms, they serve the same purpose. Looking at the two major platforms — Android and iOS, Android usually has the notifications for every app set to on by default while iOS requires you to give permission to the app to send you notifications.
Since my daily usage is largely on an Android device, I will primarily be mentioning the interesting things I have found out with the notifications on this platform.
It has been quite a while that this technology has been available for implementation and to list down some of the common ways in which the notifications have been used so far would be —
- Reminding about your pending activities in a game.
- Advertise newly available items/sales.
- Informing about any responses/likes/retweets/comments on your social media posts.
- Updating you about any new content on websites/pages/channels you follow.
As they are aptly called ‘notifications’, they basically do their job of informing you but the ways in which some of the apps have done it is quite commendable in giving the user a better experience. When a game reminds you that your kingdom is going to be attacked, it makes you come and keep your defenses ready for the battle. This is a very useful way in which the game keeps you engaged while giving you relevant information which results in useful interactions.
While on the other hand, there are apps which notify you about things that might not be really useful. For example, getting reminded about a great deal on a lingerie set when I have usually purchased books is not really something that would interest me.
Through this post series, I will list down my experiences with notifications in the apps I interact with in my daily use. I hope it works as a personal reference for good and bad practices to consider for the whys, whens and hows of targeting your users and improving engagement.
I am on Twitter.
Help me make this YUUGE! Go ahead and ❤ it!
