Birthday Notifications on Twitter — A Case Study.
An attempt at designing a birthday notification feature which allows users to choose to be notified of the birthdays of the people they follow.
Introduction
My first interaction with Twitter was eleven years ago in 2009. I didn’t get the hang of it and I created and deleted several accounts until 2015 when I finally decided to stay put.
It wasn’t until 2018 that I became a very active user on Twitter. I made friends, advocated for causes, followed political agendas, got updated with happenings around the world and stalked my crush for years (I’ve moved on now.)
As much as I love Twitter, there are features I wish it had — like an edit option (for when you notice spelling or grammatical errors in your tweet) or an option to mass delete tweets (because sometimes you just want to start afresh) or even get notified of my friends’ birthdays.
Problem Statement
In July 2015, Twitter launched the “birthday” feature which allows users to add their birthdays to their profiles. What they didn’t include though is a feature that reminds users of the birthdays of people they follow. Twitter doesn’t notify you.
So I thought, “what if Twitter added a birthday notification option?”
User Research
I surveyed twenty-nine Twitter users using a questionnaire. There were six questions in all:
- How often do you use Twitter?
- What do you mainly use twitter for?
- Would you say you have made real friends on Twitter?
- How often do you wish tweeps a happy birthday?
- How do you know or remember their birthdays?
- How do you think you can be reminded of the birthdays of the people you follow on Twitter?
From the survey, I found that:
- 65% use Twitter regularly (almost everyday.)
- 60% mostly use Twitter to get information. 40% use it to promote their businesses. 10% use it mainly to connect with others.
- 68% of the users have made real friends on the app.
- 51% rarely send birthday wishes, 34% never send birthday wishes and 15% send birthday wishes regularly.
- 86% said they are only aware of birthdays when they see related tweets on their timeline.
“I don’t really remember or get a prompt about birthdays. I only send wishes if I come across a birthday tweet on my timeline.”
- 62% said they’d like to get notifications or reminders.
“Well if Twitter could Pop up ‘17 people you follow have their birthdays today, wish them a happy birthday’ notification, that’ll be great”
User story
After the initial survey, I did a follow up interview with some of the users who filled the questionnaire to find out their reasons for wanting birthday notifications and created two user stories from their responses:
- Amber owns a clothing business and uses Twitter to market and network with potential customers. She wants birthday notifications so she can build better relationships with clients by remembering their birthdays and tweeting about it. Her end goal is to use the occasion to tell users she has products that can be purchased as gifts.
- Wale is a blogger and uses Twitter to get some of his contents. He wants birthday notifications so he can show his sources he cares about them and that their relationship isn’t just about the news he gets from them.
Brainstorming & Design Process
Of course, the next logical step was to figure out what the feature would look like on the app if I were to design it.
My design was simple — add “birthday” to the list of notification options on a user’s profile. All a user has to do is go to their friend’s page, click the notification button and select “birthday”.
When I showed this sketch to a Twitter user, he pointed out that it would be frustrating to have to go to each user’s page to enable birthday notifications. I asked other users and they agreed with him. So I had to figure out how to enable birthday notifications en masse.
My first idea was to have a cake emoji next to the name of the people a user is following. When a user goes to his “following” tab, he would see a cake button next to the names and if he clicks on it, he has chosen to be notified of that person’s birthday.
This idea didn’t work because when I did a test run (with the above pic) with a few users and explained what I was trying to do, they pointed out that the cake looked more like the followers were celebrating their birthdays rather than a notification option.
So I went back to brainstorming.
My next idea (for enabling birthday notifications en masse. In case you forgot) was to add the birthday feature under “Push Notifications” in Settings. This means a user doesn’t get notified of birthdays unless he goes to his settings to toggle on the “Birthday” notification.
The sketch below shows what comes on the screen when “Birthdays” is turned on and when it’s off. I wasn’t bothered about UX writing at this point so I didn’t focus on using the perfect words to guide the user’s interaction.
As you can see from the sketch, when a user turns on “Birthdays” the list of people he follows appears with a check box next to their names. All the user has to do is click on whose birthday he wants to be notified of.
Later on, it occured to me that a user might have a lot of people he follows and going through the entire list every time he wants to turn on notifications can become tedious. I needed to find a way to make it less stressful.
My first attempt was to add two options — “selected users” and “unselected users” — so that when a user clicks on either option, he sees either just the people he has selected for birthday notifications or the people he hasn’t selected.
This idea was too complicated and confusing for the users I tested it with. Even with the descriptive texts, they didn’t really understand what I was trying to do. According to the users, the interface was loaded with too many toggle options and they couldn’t tell at a glance what was going on.
One of them suggested I used tabs instead and I redesigned the sketch. I showed the end product (below👇🏽) to the users to see if they would understand the process without me telling them. They did. They preferred the tabs to the toggles.
Now that the birthday notification option has been updated and tested, I designed what the notification itself would look like.
So you’ve enabled notifications for birthdays, what would it look like when it’s D-Day?
Here’s how:
At the end of the design process, I put all the relevant sketches together and carried out another survey on a new set of users to see if the design was intuitive enough for them to interpret.
Here are some of the responses:
Conclusion
This is only the first half of this case study and it helped me understand better why user-centered design is absolutely necessary when creating a product. Testing my sketches with users at each design phase allowed me to make changes as soon as possible which saved time I would have wasted drawing the sketches from scratch again.
In the second half of the project, I’ll show the information architecture, digital wireframes, final prototype of the design and evaluation from users.
Thank you for reading. Please share tips or suggestions for improvement in the comment section.
P.S. This is my first UX case study since I started learning UX Design and so far, I’ve found it exciting but broad. There’s so much to learn but that’s part of the challenge.
