Develop a communication strategy that drives user engagement with targeted messaging.
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When crafting a user experience its important to provide users with feedback about the status of their account within a user experience. Users value the ability to understand when things need their attention. Notifications also offer an opportunity for company’s to communicate to their users, make announcements, and drive engagement.
We’ll cover different types of messaging that range in level of importance, different methods of communication, and considerations around how to implement each to fit your product’s needs.
Developing a severity framework
When crafting notifications its important to consider the level of importance for your users, your business, and the urgency with which you want a user to respond. Generally I like to set a 3-tiered severity framework: Vital, Preventative, & Informative notifications.
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What is a vital notification and how are they treated?
When categorizing notifications I think of vital as the top priority from a user and business perspective. The defining characteristic of a vital notification: Something needs immediate attention in that moment of time. This can be part of a workflow, process, or the status of a user’s account as it pertains to the product.
Some examples of vital notifications:
Subscription issues - A user’s account is at risk due to payment or subscription issues
Account changes - An account is going to be charged for overages, or a subscription change that requires immediate attention (including terms & policy changes)
Unexpected issues - This bucket touches on any data or workflow issues that would lead to bad information for users.
Destructive feedback - Communicating the act of deleting, destroying, or removing data with a confirmation mechanism
Designing a vital notification:
UI Design - Use of red to pull the viewer’s focus
UX Design - Grabs the user’s focus until the issue is resolved
Note - Be careful when categorizing vital notifications, misrepresenting marketing messages or alerts with vital messaging can lead to notification blindness.
Vital Notification Delivery methods -
Push notifications - Messaging on a user’s device that brings them back into a product experience. Consider developing a deep-linking strategy or accelerating a user’s path to resolving an issue.
Modals - A modal/dialog/popup is a user interface that is contained with messaging that needs relevant attention. Consider your user’s ideal resolution, should a modal be a blocking action, informative, or recurring on a specific cadence.
Banners - A persisting banner can serve as feedback to let a user know whether or not an issue is resolved, give user’s details on what issues they are facing, and steps to fix any underlying issues.
Email - Consider emailing users and using the subject message to indicate the urgency of a message. Email provides a way to communicate with users directly without them needing to be in your product, or providing permissions for push notifications.
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What is a preventative notification and how are they treated?
Preventative notifications are built to communicate potential issues, ways to resolve them, and provide users the ability to mark things as resolved or addressed. Preventative notifications can be thought of as issues that have not become vital yet.
Some examples of preventative notifications:
Subscription changes - Communicating upcoming changes to a user that may not immediately impact their app experience
Requesting user review - ****Notifying a user of something that needs their attention but is not vital to their product experience.
Warning feedback - Communicating that something may not operate as intended, where the user is able to override the system. Note that in some cases a warning may lead to a vital issue, upgrading its severity.
Designing a preventative notification:
UI Design - Use of yellow or orange to pull the viewer’s focus
UX Design - Notify users of the necessary alert with steps to recognize, diagnose, and recover from issues.
Preventative Notification Delivery methods -
Banners - A persisting banner can serve as feedback to let a user know whether or not an issue is resolved, give user’s details on what issues they are facing, and steps to fix any underlying issues.
Modals - A modal can be used to communicate an alert as a user enters the product, a specific user interface, or triggered by a relevant workflow.
Email - Consider emailing users and using the subject message to indicate the impact of the issue the user’s account or the system is facing. Email can provide a channel to drive user action before something becomes vital.
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What is an informative notification and how are they treated?
Informative notifications serve as a way to communicate the impact of a user action, provide messaging to users, or request information from a user (on behalf of your product). Think of informative notifications as user feedback that communicates the successful completion of an action, descriptions, and added value.
Some examples of preventative notifications:
Success messages - Communicates the successful update of data in an application
Description/Elaboration - Explains how something works, how it is valuable to a user, or provides general details to a user.
Feature-gating - Informs users about features or services that are available on different plans, as well as how to gain access to them.
Designing a preventative notification:
UI Design - Use of branded design elements that allow users to discover and learn at their own pace, does not block the core user experience.
UX Design - Provides concise information that is relevant to the user, for better engagement make informative notifications contextual to what a user is seeing or doing.
Informative Notification Delivery methods -
Banners - An informative banner that users can acknowledge, take action on, or dismiss to focus on the core platform experience.
Modals (use sparingly) - Communicating new features, product changes, or educational content in relation to a flow.
Tooltips - A popup that provides more information when a user engages with it, most commonly used as a hover interaction on desktop experiences.
Surveys - A request for users to fill out information in relation to your brand or product offering.
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Consider the best notification cadence for your users
Another important thing to consider is the delivery cadence of messages. Think about batching messages by creating a delay and grouping your messages. A messaging product may benefit from real-time notifications, but other products may meet notification conditions then change, or lead to several messages. You want to keep an open-line of communication with your audience, notification overload may lead users to turn off notifications, unsubscribe from emails, and disengage with in-product messaging.
In conclusion
Creating an effective product notification strategy should focus on keeping users engaged and informed while keeping the user-journey in mind. Understanding different types of notifications, delivery methods, and delivery cadence can improve user engagement.
A severity framework, such as the three tiered approach of vital, preventative, and informative messages, helps prioritize messaging and communicate across a team when and how to use each. Choosing the right delivery method for each type of notification is equally important. This framework serves as a foundation that your product can use to craft your notification strategy. Measure your user engagement, optimize based on your audience, and find what works best for you.