How to write great notifications that sound like a human wrote them
Okay! I recently wrote a bunch of notifications for a productivity app called One Big Thing, and, can I say, they were super awesome!
Funny, real, motivational, deep, edgy, cool yet personal, they had it all! These are the boxes you want to tick when writing notifications and I’ll show you how so you can write great ones too.
The key is to personify the notification voice you are using
The user needs to visualize the personality quirks and physical appearance of the voice. You know why everyone hates Siri? It’s coz she has zero personality! If anything, she’s kinda snarky,[1] and that’s only endearing if you’re Snape (snif!).
Now, with everything being branded, putting personality into your notifications is a great way to extend a company’s cool public voice. MailChimp for example gets it right:
What works here is the notification sounds like a cool gothy person with lank black hair sympathizing with you in a whispery voice. Her conspiratorial tone makes you feel less dumb for making a user error. And what more, it’s not really an “error”, which is how most websites treat it. It’s really just a super inconvenience to you that someone took your username! This personable exchange also softens your annoyance at having to remain longer in the limbo land of app signups–where you never even wanted to be in the first place, dang it!
The lesson here: conjure a real person behind the notification voice! You know those UX user personas everyone’s creating? By approaching this from the system side we can similarly create some notification personas!
The main criteria for writing notifications: humor
Let’s break down more criteria for what works when writing notifications, using mine as examples.
As a quick up-to-speed, my phone notifications are reminders to get “one big thing” done that day. For example one morning it might tell you : “If they can send man to the moon, you can do One Big Thing!”.
My main aim was to not sound in any way like a nag or a heartless corporate drone. The way to avoid that is to use humor! But not stand-up comedy type humor — more like a subtly funny take on cultural references.
Pair humor with cultural references
Basically my notifications were culled from the following three different cultural categories. Since pop culture covers everything from TV to art, it’s a really rich area to instantly find a common bond between you and your user:
- Media pop culture references (TV, films, books, trendy sayings…)
- Clever takes on pseudo zen philosophy
- Fairyland or fantasy references
Pop culture references
By FAR most of my notifications fall into the first category, “Pop culture references”.
- For example, this notification references the Simpsons:
“Any time you hear the wind blow it will whisper: One Big Thing…” - And this one references the title of several popular self-help books:
“Eat, sleep, do One Big Thing.” - While this one nods to Robert Frost’s ubiquitous poem:
“Choose the path less traveled…by starting your One Big Thing.”
Notice that these pop references are not obscure. Even if you’ve never read Elizabeth Gilbert’s books (I haven’t) or any Robert Frost, most people have been bombarded with path-less-traveled analogies in their lifetime.
Pseudo philosophy references
Moving on, the second biggest category, “Clever takes on pseudo zen philosophy”, IS more obscure. Why would I reference such an unknown area then? WHY?
Here are notification examples in this area:
- “Ancient trees grow to the sky like your One Big Thing.”
- “Inner noise silenced, One Big Thing flows like water.”
(This is a pseudo-haiku!) - “One Big Thing is like morning mist on a snowy mountain.”
(Oh, so dreamy!)
Now, to understand this last notification, I’m not assuming you spent three rapturous hours admiring the Song dynasty masterpiece “Falling Water Near a Brook” at the Seattle Art Museum last Thursday then ran feverishly home to replicate the winter landscape on rice paper you had sitting around. No. I’m just assuming you vaguely know that old Chinese art has zen nature themes.
And then I reference these themes because pairing pseudo zen philosophy with mobile app notifications is kinda funny, yet apt, given their self-improvement subtext! You could use any kind of philosophy from any time and place–Hindu philosophy (like yoga) and stuff from The Art of War comes to mind as good areas to mine!
Fairyland or fantasy references
Finally, the last big category covers fairyland or fantasy references, like these notifications:
- “Croaking frogs on a sea of lily pads cheer your One Big Thing.”
- “A butterfly in fairyland will open its wings if you do One Big Thing.”
- “One Big Thing will lead you to the end of the rainbow.”
The fairyland category infuses the notifications with another perspective, one with more stereotypically feminine, childlike, and animation notes. Doing so balances out the other categories and reflects the well-rounded interests of a Real Person!
These personality-driven notifications also allow you to visualize the speaker: I see someone who’s kind of artsy-fartsy and likes to read Deep Books. She probably puts soy in her latte and wears odd colors. Hey, that’s me, haha! Now isn’t she more interesting to talk to than Siri?
So to sum up:
- You want to create a notification persona that has 3–5 different areas of interests that you can then reference in your notifications, just like a real person would be identified by key hobbies and interests. Sports! Cooking! Writing! Gardening! Guitar playing!
- Don’t be snarky!
- Use humor to skew cultural references.
And that’s it for how to write real-sounding notifications that delight instead of enrage your users. If you have any other insights into how to make a good system persona let me know!
[1] Susan Bennett, the voiceover actress who is the voice of Siri, says she sounds so snippy because they probably used her voice from the end of the recording sessions, when she was really bored. See “Voice of Siri Reveals Herself — And Why the iPhone “Assistant” Sounds So Snippy” in Time.com: http://techland.time.com/2013/10/04/voice-of-siri-reveals-herself-and-why-the-iphone-assistant-sounds-so-snippy/. Accessed February 22, 2016.
