Send Yourself Push Notifications

If you’re building a web or mobile app and would like to learn from your users, you should send yourself push notifications.

Every time a new user installs my app I send myself a notification.

I also send myself other push notifications based on app specific events. This has helped me increase conversion, improve user experience and find bugs.

Remotely is a job board for the remote workforce. Whenever a new job seeker installs the app, it’s my goal to have them enable push notifications and subscribe with their email. A successful onboarding experience looks like:

• New Install: The first time the app is launched on a device.
• Prompt Notifications: The view prompting the user to enable push notifications was seen.
• Notifications Enabled: (true/false): The result of the push notification prompt.
• Prompt Subscribe: The view prompting the user to subscribe with their email was seen.
• Subscribed: The result of the email subscription prompt.

Improving the Onboarding Experience

Initially, whenever a user launched the app for the first time they’d see the push notification prompt followed by the email subscription prompt. Very quickly I was able to see a pattern in the notifications I was receiving. It was clear users who enabled push notifications had a much higher probability of subscribing with their email versus users who disabled or skipped the push notification prompt. In hindsight, this should have been intuitive.

I took this learning and updated the onboarding experience. Now, I only prompt the user to subscribe with their email if they enable push notifications. It’s important the user has a positive initial experience, so I don’t want them to feel like they’re being spammed. I’d prefer to wait until clear user engagement to show the subscription prompt.

Finding a “Bug”

I was receiving multiple “Subscribed” notifications for the same email.

My first thought was there must be a bug in the code that sends the notification. I checked the database to confirm, but noticed there were actually multiple entries for those specific email addresses. Hm…

My next thought was the user could tap the “Subscribe” button quickly multiple times creating multiple subscription events. I tried to reproduce that theory, but was unable to. The code checked out too. The user’s interaction was disabled after the first tap.

I then realized there was no visual confirmation for the user to let them know they successfully subscribed. When the user tapped subscribe, the view would disappear immediately. I tested out this hypothesis by changing the button color from blue to green and the button text from “Subscribe” to “Subscribed 👍” after a successful subscription.

As soon as this new feature shipped I stopped receiving the duped subscription notifications. It turned out the users were finding the subscription prompt button and actually subscribing multiple times!

Wrapping Up

It’s helpful to use push notifications to learn from your users. Receiving events in real-time gives you a better feel for the user’s experience and engagement compared to traditional analytic tools. They allow you to make improvements faster with far less data points. It also helps you focus in on the most important features of your app.

If you’re looking for a remote job or an employer looking to hire remotely, check out Remotely in the App Store.