Nothing makes a user want to uninstall an app more than unwanted notifications. In fact, it was the number one reason back in 2013 according to this study. Notifications have only become more prevalent since. We wanted to give our customers the ability to manage all of their communications from one area of the app while informing them of required, banking-related notifications that will always be sent.
April 2019 - April 2020
T-Mobile MONEY customers should be able to manage all of their communication preferences from the app and the web.
This project was part of a bigger initiative of adding communication preferences to the app and web.
Some big open questions were:
For the minimal viable product (MVP) version of the notifications release, we were only concered about 3 settings:
Some takeaways we found from the se examples and others:
We noticed a lot of apps had a channel-based navigation for their notifications. This meant that notifications were organized by their channel. So, there was a page for all push notifications or all email notifications.
This is something I explored but I found it to be too many extra taps when we only have 3 notifications. Plus, these apps operate with the user owning only 1 account within the app. T-Mobile MONEY customers could have 2 or 3 separate accounts, each with their own notification settings.
Allowing the notifications to house their channels allowed us to easily break up notifications by account, giving the user context. Looking ahead, we may want to adjust the navigation to be organized by channel rather than notification.
One of the things that jumped out at me right away was the amount of toggles and inputs. For one or two notifications we could get away with each notification containing 4 toggles. As the app expands, we’ll probably want to come up with a more compact solution.
Our notifications included alerts and updates that are required to be always on. Things like successful transfers or fraud alerts. One of the challenges was having editable notifications alongside non-editable notifications. Since we were organizing notifications into their respective accounts, the user would see both. Maybe some notifications will have required channels? I explored different options, and my colleague also added some options as well.
Users should be able to edit each channel at the notification-level. I wanted to explore what happens when they turn off all channels or if they turn the whole notification off. I created a prototype to show the interactions of toggling a notificatio and its channels.
The user should be able to set a threshold for each of their notifications. I created a prototype to show the saving process that the development team would reference. I also added a pattern for handling any ajax errors.
Like many of the apps we checked out, we wanted to ask the user if it was okay to send them notifications ahead of popping up the native opt-in window. This is a common pattern and I think many phone users in our demographic are used to this experience.
For android users, we found out that all apps are opted-in by default upon download and users have to manually opt-out of notifications.
The tricky part was a customer who initally selected to be opted out of notifications on their device. It comes into play when a customer attempts to change the push notification setting in the device while notifications are disabled at the OS level.
For this case, I prototyped the flow required of the user to see how it would work. We adjusted our flows to mimic the prototype as well.
As a rule, we try to give all options available to the app users to the web user. We had the same goal with notifications.
Notifications created an interesting problem for our current settings structure. At the time, the web settings relied upon an accordion style, 1 page settings page for all settings. Since we wanted to keep context of an account while editing notifications, I had to update the structure of the settings pages to accomodate this.
This wasn’t a full redesign, so I focused on how to make changes within the current architecture without upsetting the whole experience or design. These changes do an extra click in some cases, but I think it provides a better structure to organize the content in.
The changes I introduced:
After initial tests and exploration, we met with T-Mobile to include them in the process. We worked with them on copy and adjusted the IA after their feedback.
Using the flows, prototypes and mock ups I built, we were able to understand the flows and experience for our customers.
