Annoying notifications & how to design them better

The first thing that comes to mind after waking up? Checking your phone for notifications. We are kind of used to red screens from pings an unread content — annoying? Yes, but also helpful if well designed and well managed. It’s doable, but depends on the capacity of users, and how many crucial apps they have installed already.

The over-manager

The art of designing apps always takes into account the user. A busy manager can be overwhelmed from Slack, G-mail, Asana notifications — too many red blurbs with irrelevant content such as newsletters, LinkedIn Invites or Spotify actualizations, can ruin the feed. Well managed apps for this type of users would use pings just to notify about the most important stuff, newest conversations or meetings. Bad example is given by iOS itself — in the mail feed you can find everything from clothing summer sales to info about your business meeting. G-mail division for main & offers works so much better.

The time-killer

Waiting in a line, everyone has their faces in the screens. Push, ping, click — few points just made it into your Candy Crash Saga account. Notifications for gamers are sometimes a positive reminder about scores or other logged in users, but can be an unpleasant reminder about the payment, or notifications with the same information over and over again. Instead of having a pleasant gaming experience, too many pings can damage the experience. Best designed notifications have a fine system of showing info while the user is playing (& paying attention) not after the game — a red mark about unread messages won’t do the trick.

The Instagram beauty

Social Media addicts are all around us and they’re the ones that need notifications the most. Best classmate birthday reminder, post share, personal mention… However, everybody uses Social Media! Pings should be adjusted in two ways — first, divided by the user: frequent, addicted user can be informed more often, secondly, divided by the channel: every retweet? Every Instagram like? It’s best to suggest options based on Customer Journey Map. Think of your users — what can be the most crucial content for them? Think of the usability on your channel — what can be interesting on your feed for each user?

The millennials scheme

Apps make life easier — that’s a fact. Especially for millennials — applications can manage the things, that we tend to forget about. Payment apps, music updates notes, vlogs or mobile travel guides will make a difference, if notifications will be well designed & informative in sense of reminding and knowledge sharing. Time matters, so the more knowledge you present in efficient and time-saving manner. This works perfectly for Google Calendar or Pocket. Bad examples can be found in airline apps or food apps — too many irrelevant content can put off users.