Notification feature redesign

Project Title:

Redesign of Notification Feature for Cloud-Native Software Asset Management Platform.

Platform used for managing software assets, licenses, and subscriptions in large and medium corporations. The platform also tracks spending, identifies potential savings, and forecasts future expenditures.

Objective:

To enhance the notification feature.

Context:

The existing notification feature did not meet user expectations and required a comprehensive redesign to better serve the needs of the users.

My role:

A leading designer, coordinating work with a regular designer.

Assesment of current solution

Analysing personas needs & problems

Competition analysis

User survey & interviews

Gathering a list of notifications needed in the platform

Mockups iterations

Usability test - more iterations

Hi-Fi creation

shipping to dev

implementation oversee

Steps I have taken

Project overview

Problem statement

Enhancing the feature to suit users needs.

  • Very simple feature

  • Information only about general events in the platform, for ex. successful data edit, adding a new user etc.

  • The notifications consist of a title and a short description

  • No interaction options

  • Subscription to general categories of notifications

  • Notifications is just a long list that can be read

Current solution state assesment

Some of the user

needs & problems I have identified

Being informed on important/critical events in the platform

Option to be directed to the place of the event from the notification

Ability to manage if critical events have been acknowledged and worked on with information about state

Possibility to choose some critical events notifications to be also sent via e-mail & chat apps

Team leads would like to decide who is informed about critical events and want to be sure they can't turn it off

Sometimes users can't find a notification for an event they would like to be informed about

Received messages list:

Incoming messages are differentiated into alerts and notifications

Every alert has: a status, state it is in, and the name of the person that is resolving it.

User that decides to resolve an alert can assign it to themselves so that other can see it and see the status

Obligatory links are attached to each alert that leads to the place of occurrence.

Possibility to pin incoming messages

Filtering options

Some of the conclusions

During the research, it turned out that users differentiate two types of notifications: more general, informative ones and critical events that need users' attention. Based on that the feature has been divided into two parts:

Notifications are distributed into more general categories to which every user can subscribe/unsubscribe.

Alerts are information on critical events that are shown in a detailed list with settings (thresholds, recipients assignment, external messages). This is available for the administrator to set up and can be also assigned as a role to another user.

There are three types of users relevant in case of notifications:

Administrator user – user which sets up the platforms, oversees data flows and connections

Regular user – doesn’t see administrative settings, interested in product information

Admin/Team Leader – user who decides who receives what kind of alerts, has access to alerts settings

Final Design

Alert settings options:

Alerts can be assigned individually, to a user group or to a role.

Type of delivery can be selected (in app, email, chat)

Option to create custom alerts.

Categories and filtering options

Notification subscription is in power of every user.