5 key elements of friendly notifications

Have you ever paid attention to the number of notifications received daily from different services and applications? Which ones are really important to you? This question becomes relevant in connection with the increase in the number of such services.



We get a lot of messages that are not paying due attention. For us it is now commonplace to remove "informational garbage." Why? Let's get a look. When you start using a service or install a mobile app, you may want to receive its notification only when they are really useful and can carry value in them. The problem is that only a few follow this rule.
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As a regular user, I hate them; for the owner of the product, this is not only an information tool, but also a promising marketing tool that delivers the message to the right user at the right time for promotional purposes. How can you turn a notification into a useful and convenient message for both the owner of the service and the user?

1. Importance

Before you start designing notifications, ask yourself if you really need it. This may sound absurd, but many messages should not appear on users' screens. Think about whether the user should go into some details of the application? If the notification is not very informative and does not require any technical actions, then it is most likely not important. On the other hand, reports of critical errors that entail a decrease in performance or loss of information should be useful to users of the service. A good example in this case is the page for reporting a broken page in Google Chrome.

2. Relevance and timeliness

The best way to keep up to date is the good old analysis of user information. Nothing better than statistics will tell you about people. During the creation of notifications, try to pay attention to information about using the service. This will help increase the return and increase the relevance of messages. Try to calculate the delivery time of alerts. Night time, of course, is not the best time to communicate with the user. Statistics will help you catch the most appropriate moment based on the time zones of the audience of the application.

3. Personalization

It is always good to have notifications with your own settings. This does not mean that in each application you need to allow messages to be turned off (although such a function would be needed), but the ability to edit alerts is important. Users would be happy to see only those notifications they have chosen to receive. The message setting feature would be useful when starting a project when you do not yet have a sufficient user base. After a while, you will see notification topics that are really interesting to users.

4. Clear and understandable text

Regardless of the content of the message, make sure that it is written in the user's language so that he can read it. Make alerts clear and practical. Try to avoid spammer phrases like “You won!” Or “100% FREE”. Try to create them in the same style and design, as well as the relevant symbolism of the application.

5. Efficient delivery

There are many ways to deliver notifications: SMS, Email, Push notifications, Web notifications, Pop-up messages and others. To use them correctly, we divide the methods into two groups: “From application to person” and “from person to person”. Depending on the type and objectives of the project, these groups may have different priorities. For example, Instagram users would rather like to find out about new photos of friends, and not about requests for feedback on the application.



Knowing the right type and method of delivering notifications is key to the success of any project.