Prioritizing Notifications
Building off of my previous blog post where I discussed a problem that exists with phone notifications we began digging deeper to create a solution. Our intended user base is pretty much everybody with a smartphone so it’s important that our approach is accessible. People have different needs when it comes to how they use their phones and this can be seen through what apps they use and check the most throughout the day. By giving users the option to choose which apps are most important, we allow them to be more connected to the information they deem as most important. Our goal is to give users the ability to prioritize apps from notifications as well as the specific in-app notifications within them as well.
Early Design
We began our design process with initial sketches of how our change to the notification system would look for users. We wanted it to be clear enough for the user to understand what their change means in regards to how they get their notifications. With notifications being one of the main ways for our phones to relay information to us, messing this up would cause the user great dissatisfaction and confusion. We decided to model our design and prototypes after iOS due to convenience and familiarity with the system and its existing options.
We created a Notifications setting screen with a new “Order By” option bar, which would allow users the option to customize the order of their app notifications. Tapping on “Order By” brings you to a new “Order By” screen. Its default setting (Time) simply orders the app notifications by time as per usual. Changing the option to manual revealed a list of installed apps on the phone with a hamburger menu for each one, which allowed the user to rank the apps by order of importance by dragging and dropping them throughout the list (highest priority at the top, lowest at the bottom).
We also created a paper mockup of the lock screen with certain priorities already set as an example of how the changes would affect the user once set (See if you can tell which app has the highest priority!). If you couldn’t tell, it would be Gmail because it is still at the top of the notification bar despite other application having more recent notifications.
User Feedback
We asked testers what they thought of the notifications they received when they just woke up, a time where notifications come in overnight and may stack. They said:
“When I wake up in the morning, what’s happening on my social media isn’t important to me. I need to know my reminders for the day, any emails I’ve gotten on my university address, relevant events scheduled for the day. I need to organize and resolve my priorities first.”
“Nowadays, the first thing I wanna see on my phone is the news. My daily briefing from the New York Times, any alerts about the pandemic in my country, followed by any messages I’ve gotten from friends or social media notifications. Stuff like that is what gets me through the day.”
“I don’t know if it’s just me but most mornings I’ll wake up to check my phone to see what I have going on for the day, and I’ll have to comb through so many unnecessary or irrelevant notifications first to actually get to what matters to me and what’s important for the day.”
These comments again highlight the varied natures of our user base. Some people give higher value to social media apps notifications while others find them unnecessary and want to see the notifications that help them be more productive.
During user testing, we asked users if they found the screens simple to navigate. It was important that we nailed down the ease of our settings to be set because it would be an option for all users to be able to understand how it works. Our testers understood the “Order By” option and what it meant but some were not automatically intuitive that they had to slide the apps in order of priority. Some also expressed concerns that what if a certain notification was very important but ultimately somewhat hidden to the user due to the fact that it was low on the priority list. This gave another idea as to how we could further iterate our design.
This existed as a “In-App Notifications” screen but our testers had a lot of trouble understanding what this meant and its function, and we later realized we had the wrong meaning as well. This could be accesed from the “Order By” screen and was intended as a way for users to be able to control what types of notifications may bypass priority. However, In-App notifications refer to notifications that occur while the user is in the app, not outside, so this did not apply to our problem. Also, the options listed weren’t broad enough of a scope of the different information a notification may have.
Second Iteration
In the second iteration, we revised and renamed the “In-App Notifications” screen to “Overrides”. As we realized from user feedback and more thought, there are times where certain apps should be able to override the priority system based off the content of the notification.
For example, let’s say someone who doesn’t eat out a lot has UberEats notifications on their phone set as low priority. However, one day they decide to order out and place an order through the app. During that time, they may become distracted and forget they ordered food or because of how the low the priority is, may not even see the “Your order is here” notification.
In this iteration we came up with multiple types of app notifications. With this setting, users can toggle on and off what kinds of overrides the apps are allowed to do. So, Uber Eats can break the chain for a time-sensitive notification such as an order pickup, but not for a promotional notification. We also added more types of notifications that may happen such as a Breaking News Alert
Creating iOS Prototypes
We then used InVision & Sketch to upgrade our paper mockups to prototypes that fit the look of Apple’s iOS and were interactive. We found from user testing that these prototypes were even more intuitive to navigate because they looked just like iPhone’s format. We also further iterated the “Overrides” screen to “Interrupt If” for clarity as well as provided explanations under each option to the effect toggling it has.
See the gif below to see our InVision prototype in action! (Starts on Notifications Screen)
Final Comments
Overall, I found this final project to be fun throughout the process and fulfilling in the end. Thinking of a way to solve a problem that doesn’t clearly exist was a challenge and forced us to really try and open our eyes to how and what we interact with some of the subtle parts of our lives. I did also enjoy the process and experience of prototyping and using user feedback as a way to tell us what needed to be clarified or added.
