Designing Notifications for Better Product Adoption

Beginning to flush out necessary features for the minimum viable product of an app I am collaborating on, my team and I have agreed that push notifications are a necessary piece of our user experience. To provide context without spoiling the idea, the user will receive personalized notifications to ensure personal accountability throughout the day. With this, I began to do a deep dive of the workings of a notification — knowing that there was likely more than writing a flashy message to attract user attention. There is much more, of course. Notifications are purposed to provide value to the user in their experience with the digital product from which the notification spawns from, not be garbage that overpopulates the user’s home screen only to be ignored (which seems like the latter is more common than not now a days). Below I go over some of my key findings from my learnings about notifications.

To start, push notifications require three characteristics to be effective:

1. Relevant (displaying information they want)
2. Timely (appearing at the time they want)
3. Contextual (makes sense with the experience of the product)

From the product side, the rule of thumb in deploying a good, and useful notification is asking “Would I send this to someone I care about?” The user is already motivated to use the product, that’s why they’ve downloaded the app, but the investment phase can be delicate as they are evaluating the app’s value and utility in their own life. Good, personally drawn notifications can push consumer lifetime value due to perceived value in the app and outside of it when receiving a notification.

With this exists the “Habit-Goal Interface”, the time span taken for the user determine if their goal is worth spending time on. The goal of a product here should be to decrease this time period as much as possible by providing so much relevant, timely, and contextual value for the user to adopt and invest.

For a user to perceive that there is personal value in the product, and the notifications as a facet of that, it is important to provide appropriate autonomy. This sounds redundant, but to explain — in the time spent on the Habit-Goal Interface, the user self-determines if she want to use the app for its integration into her own life. Because the user has this choice in the initial adoption of the product, it is important for the user to feel like she is in charge. If the app suggests the user’s motives, self-determination is taken out of the equation — the user does not perceive as much value in adopting the product as it is no longer her choice to.

We engage with something when it lets us explore who we could be if we mastered it. In the Habit-Goal Interface period, when the user decides if the product’s experience will be of value to them, much of that value is foreseen in the user’s end goal, and what goal or feeling they hope to achieve from using the product. Users say they like a product because they like themselves, or like the vision of what they will become from using the product. With this, it is important to guide people into learning the self determined reasons for engagement, so to promote autonomy and aspiration in the critical time of the product’s on boarding experience.

Expanding on the necessity of self-determination in product adoption, the user decides whether they will integrate the product into their lifestyle or not. Integration occurs when a user adopts a product as part of their own personal identity — the product an expression of who they are or would like to be. Integration requires three needs:

1. Autonomy (the product allowing for the feeling of choice and self-determination)
2. Competence (the product successfully meeting the demands of the activity the user wishes to accomplish)
3. Relatedness (what the user cares about also cares about them)

Tying integration back to notifications, the designer can ask when creating a useful notification for their product “how will this message make them feel?”

Designing notifications so to consider the user’s goals, motivations, and feelings, along with identifying the psychology product adoption, a product can speak to its user so to integrate and be used actively with positively perceived value.