Process

Now I will go through the process of how we discovered the problem, the main takeaways from the process we used to frame and how we segmented our ideas and solutions to the problem.

Understanding our users

As a team, we first looked into our own experiences and found issues that we had encountered. By doing so, we were able to ask the questions to other users throughout each phase of product development and iteration to be sure that we were designing for other voices other than ourselves.

Here are some questions:

What is the story of the experience that we want people to have?

What is happening before people get in and start interacting with the notifications?

What are they feeling and thinking?

What got them on the screen in the first place?

What happens afterward?

What changes would make the notification system valuable to the users?

Understanding why people have difficulty engaging

Micah Epstein(one of the interviewees) sharing his iOS experience

User Research

We interviewed students about their experiences in iOS notifications. Our goal was to learn about how users interact with the current iOS notification system and how they digest information sent from notifications.

Here are the main pain points and insights:

Main pain point:

Users do not have control over incoming notifications

Pain point #1: Incoming order causing clutter

In the current chronological order, time is the only factor considered for the ranking of notifications.

Thus, users have to look for important notifications in a scroll list of notifications that contains a lot of text that is not always important. It also fills up the whole lock screen and takes up a lot of space visually.

“once I missed an important notification because it was lost in the shuffle as it was overwhelming to look through it“

Pain point #2: Lacking Accessibility

Users miss notifications because the phone resets the lock screen to the clean state

After users open a notification to do a task, when coming back to the lock screen, unread notifications are vanished. This often causes users to forget the unread notifications, causing anxiety to assure that they need to remember getting back to notification center for unread notifications.

Pain point #3: Control notifications only in the Settings

Hard to filter out noises

Users had experiences of having two or three applications that they do not want to be notified about. However, in order to control incoming notifications, users need to go into “setting” and define individually for each App.

This is a long and tedious task.