Designing the BBC Music app’s notifications
How we used Lean UX principles to create an experiment and test our notification ecosystem
My role
Working on notifications within the myBBC UX team, our mission was to create a notification ecosystem that could be used across all BBC products and platforms. My role for this project was to lead the creation of notifications for the BBC Music app. With the help of 2 more junior designers we collaborated with stakeholders across myBBC and BBC Music.
Skills
- 👔 Leadership skills
- 🖋 Copywriting
- ➰ Lean UX
The challenge
The Music team was looking at ways to increase engagement on their app. We contacted them and convinced them that notifications could help them achieve their goal. We agreed to spend 3 weeks to come up with a concept in close collaboration with the Music UX and Product teams.
How might we use notifications to increase engagement?
The approach
As many stakeholders were to be involved, I decided to run some Design Sprints. The first one to look at the onboarding and the second to look at the type of notification and the copy. Both sprints would also help us to find out if users would find the notifications valuable. I reserved the last week to refine the designs and create the specs.
Sprint 1: HMW encourage users to opt-into push notifications?
Following the “understand, diverge, converge, test and iterate” process, we did a competitor analysis and interviewed our stakeholders. We learned that it was technically only possible to implement notifications based on genres.
Together with our stakeholders, we sketched some ideas to solve our design challenge and voted for our favourite. We decided to keep 3 different types of onboardings: a splash screen, a step on the app’s onboarding and in the app’s feed (see bottom image). With the 2 other Designers, we then refined the designs, prototyped and did some guerrilla testing with users.
The findings
- The splash screen was the solution that worked best
- Many users didn’t want to turn on the notifications
- Users were worry notifications would be too frequent and too general
- Users wanted very personalised notifications
Those findings helped us shape the second sprint’s challenge.
Sprint 2: HMW make genre based notifications engaging so that:
- It feels personalised
- It feels special
- It doesn’t feel too frequent
Following a similar collaborative process, I created a grid to help us generate ideas for the notification’s copy. We used it during an “Ideation” workshop with our stakeholders, but we didn’t feel we came up with the right idea.
After a bit of stress — users were coming in to test something 2 days later — we thought about letting the users create their own notifications. We created a co-design exercise that we used during the lab session. During the sessions, we also conducted some interviews to better understand how people listen to music and tested 4 types of notifications: Special pick, Popular, Best of collection and Themed.
The findings
- People are not attached to specific genres of music
- People expect very personalised notifications
Outcome
Running the sprints helped us understand that genre based notifications would not increase engagement. However, there was no alternative and the Music app’s Product Manager wanted to include notifications in his product.
I didn’t want a solution I didn’t believe in to be build, so we spent some time to think about how we could cheaply collect data from a large sample size in real conditions.
Creating a fake door experiment allowed us to quickly discard a solution and move on!
We came up with a fake door experiment, where users could select the type of notifications they want to get. To avoid to have to implement a complex notification engine and make the experiment quick to build, the app wouldn’t send any notifications. After it went live, very little users turned on genre based notifications. Given this result, we decided to deprioritise notifications and move on to our next opportunity. Taking a Lean approach helped us save a lot of time and effort building the wrong solution.
Conclusions
This project was great to practice further my communication and influencing skills. I worked with many different stakeholders form different teams and led 2 more Junior Designers. I made sure to make them feel empowered, while refocusing them when needed.
I also really enjoyed taking a Lean UX approach. It helped us move fast and make sure we build the right thing for our users.
Disclaimer: This article represent my personal views and not those of the BBC.
