Framework: Notifications

February 2023

Increase app engagement through push notifications (as measured by DAU/MAU) towards 30%.

01 / Summary

Team

Design Lead
PM
Community manager
CTO
2 x engineers

What I did

Design discovery
Ideation
Wireframing
Prototyping
iOS and Android UI design
QA

Deliverables

A notifications strategy
User flows
Notifications copy
Clickable prototype
UI designs

02 / Framework overview

Framework is an early stage startup offering an educational app aimed at business skills for employees at startup companies. The app launched in app stores in January 2023 - leading up to this point the product team ran a series of 4 sprints to ready the product for a public release.

One of the requirements around go-live was to add push notifications to the app with the purpose of driving engagement.

03 / Notifications design

My first task was to establish a holistic view of how push notifications would fit into other communications channels both within and outside the app. I mapped out the different channels (push notifications, in-app notifications, DMs, email) and then listed out all of the types of communciations that would flow through these channels (25 in total). I classified notifications as being either broadcast (e.g. a new content drop) or social (e.g. someone has replied to your comment), I then detailed each instance of a notification, its trigger, possible messaging, CTA, additional considerations and priority. This was done in Notion and shared with the team for review. The strategy was then taken by the technical team who were able to query the strategy from a technical perspective and then write a specification based on this.

At the same time I also established a set of principles to guide us when considering when making decisions around notifications in the knowledge that notifications can be perceived as irritating or annoying if not executed with care.

The principles were:

Don’t overload members - use push notifications & emails sparingly.
Give members control of notifications: both opt-in & pause (without overwhelming them with choice).
Use smart batching of notifications to increase signal.
Be mindful of the frequency that some notifications may occur and be prepared to limit, throttle or batch these if need be.
Consider the best days and times to send notifications to our audience and be aware of different time zones.

04/ Solution design

Once we had agreed on the notifications strategy and had a clear idea of the technical scope I moved into solution design. This involved 2 parts. Firstly the message design itself and secondly how we would get the user to activate notifications and agree to the system permissions for showing notifications.

The Framework app has an atypical onboarding process for new users, who are onboarded in cohorts into an ‘Entrance Hall Mode’ while they await an in-person welcome event. The entrance hall mode allows the user to familiarise themselves with the app before its content is fully unlocked and encourages them to complete a few onboarding tasks such as filling out a profile and specifying learning priorities. A prompt to enable push notifications was added to the onboarding todo list.

05/ Impact assessment

Post launch we were quickly able to see that our notification opt-in rate was only 27%, much lower than we had anticipated. In reality, opt-in rates vary a lot between different types of apps, but our expectation was around 30-40%.

While conducting feedback with our first cohorts we also heard first-hand from users who had completely missed the prompt. Other feedback suggested that members were getting more notifications than they wanted.

06/ Assumptions

Working in tandem with the PM, after looking at the data and the research we made some assumptions around why our opt in rate was so low. We concluded:

Learners see Framework as a work app that they need to install on their personal phone
Learners don't see the value of receiving Framework’s notifications
Learners are missing the prompts to enable push notifications

07/ Ideation

Taking our assumptions we ran an Opportunity Solution Tree exercise with the whole team to generate and vote on ideas around how we might increase the activation rate.

08/ Solution design

With the output of the OST session I then moved into solution design and generated a series of possibilities.

More compelling copy - expose the value of turning on notifications.
Micro-commitments - people feel less threatened by small steps that are coherent with previous actions e.g. when a user is browsing the Curriculum section prompt them to turn on notifications to see when new content is added.
Singularity effect - people care more about single, identifiable individuals over abstract groups or concepts, e.g. when a user sends a DM to another user, prompt them to turn on notifications to see when they get a response
More control - give users more control to show or hide the notifications that are most relevant to them.

I ran a design crit with the team and found strong consensus around some small bets using more compelling copy and more active prompting. The idea of giving more control to users was also liked, although the discussion also surfaced some initial technical challenges.

With the PM we then wrote up the Notifications epics and individual stories and took these into the next planning session. We prioritised a few stories that we thought would be lower effort, but potentially high value - these included adding more active prompts with new copy to the onboarding flow and showing a bottom-sheet prompt on the Curriculum tab. The remaining stories were moved into a follow-up sprint where we would take on the control screen and the idea of batching notifications for replies and likes.

The new features were delivered over a single 2-week sprint.

09/ Outcome

After just one week of releasing the notifications updates we saw an 8% uplift in notifications opt-in. Since onboading a further 3 cohorts, the opt-in rate now stands at a healthy 43% and we have not received any first hand feedback from members relating to notifications.

At Framework, we follow a continuous discovery approach and speak to members every week. Since shipping notifications we have been asking users about their experience with the feature, with an eye on whether we have given them the control they need. We will be doing a full impact assessment for notifications in the coming months.