Last Friday I was invited by the friendly people at Springload to give a talk on Push / Interactive Notifications.
The slides are targeted at Product people who are responsible with making the decision of including Push Notifications in the roadmap of their apps.
The gist of that talk is that just because you can send Push Notifications or display alerts to the user, it doesn’t mean you should. Notifications are the number one reason why people delete apps and you should keep this in mind when building your apps.
Here’s my (current) Top 10 Notification best practices:
- Guided “Opt In” rather than “Opt Out”
- Allow user to specify the types of messages they wish to receive. Support DND. Think Time Zone
- High volume of Notifications? Consider providing a “Snooze” custom action
- Only send relevant messages. This is NOT a direct marketing channel
- Don’t send confidential or sensitive data through push notifications
- Consider promoting custom actions that do not require the app to start up
- Use clear language and keep the message short
- Choose the lowest frequency of notifications that still delivers a great user experience
- Be aware of context. Is the user in your app right now?
- Consider aggregating multiple messages into a more generic “group”