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nica-headshot

Nočnica Mellifera

Recently I had a chance to talk to [DevOps
Minneapolis](https://devopsdays.org/events/2022-minneapolis/welcome/) about the [true nature of user experience](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0nqIYxMPUI). The audience found this information to be particularly interesting, so I thought it would be helpful to share it with a wider audience. This post will be the first in a series of three posts that will discuss user experience beyond your app’s UI and how you can optimize it. 

So where is your user experience? More generally, where does your application happen? For those of us who work in SaaS, the answer is simple: the application occurs inside the application interface. Whether we’re selling business tools or teaching Spanish, the application happens when our users access the UI.

![image1](//images.ctfassets.net/z7iqk1q8njt4/7fjNtDXh4kd1X705WbeUMI/1c56d888e770e3c9cd1f5b5c88e8ac0d/image1.jpg)
*Your UX is inside your application… right?*

When we talk about our users having a good experience, that much-vaunted UX, the things we’re tweaking will be inside this application. We have several specialists who worry about user experience. Whether that’s UX thinking about existing users or data and product people making sure the experience for new users is frictionless.

![UX wireframes](//images.ctfassets.net/z7iqk1q8njt4/2rwQGF8vmim0Zm0H1j0Tmn/d0c5031862d85d08998fe012b7740054/image2.png)

I don’t mean to trivialize this process: it’s much more than tweaking colors and moving buttons by a pixel. Those tasked with UX often have to ask the most basic questions: what do our users want, and what’s the best way to give it to them? This matters because however cool our technology is behind the scenes, if the user doesn’t have a good experience with it, they’re unlikely to return.

This article argues that there’s a more important user experience than the one inside your app. In fact, your app has a whole interface that has more impact on your users, that touches them more deeply than your application interface.

## It’s your notifications
![iphone notifications](//images.ctfassets.net/z7iqk1q8njt4/9UViH6p0qPhaiKC69gflN/d87cc815b893a46664348d1876a63be4/image3.jpg)
*This is where your notifications really happen.*

Many of our favorite apps largely interact with us through notifications, the examples are everywhere. 
* Tools for observability and security most frequently have all our interaction starting with notifications. After all, we're probably not checking our APM tools until we know something is wrong. 
* For social media applications, the best moment we experience with them is seeing that X number of people loved our post. 
* And for communication and collaboration applications the notifications should have most of the information that people want you to see.

In fact, I’d argue that for many of our most valued tools and services, most of our interface, for good or ill, is through notifications. Notifications bring you into the application. They provide reassurance, warnings, anxiety, or annoying notifications about sales of pizza. Notifications are your application. 

I mention all this because I believe that your UX is in danger. Primarily, the experience of notifications has been ceded to teams outside of the product team. Instead of our product team controlling notifications, it’s the operations or marketing/growth teams that control most of the notifications we send.

Let me show you far we have strayed from g-d’s light:

## The tale of the signup campaign
The time after a user creates an account is critical for any SaaS tool. Even when users sign up and immediately start using the product, there will be features or extended use cases that we, the developers, want them to try.

Put yourself in the shoes of a product team that’s trying to improve the rate at which new sign ups become committed users. In (almost) all product teams, we’ll realize that we want to get in touch with users after they sign up to encourage them to keep going with our product.

The platform doubtlessly sends a signup confirmation, and we start by tweaking that. We get our new copy and links to the operations team, or platform dev, and they change the post-signup email. But soon, we want more. First off: we don’t really want to email users the instant they sign up, we’d like to wait at least a few hours, to let the platform feel a bit familiar first. Then we’d like to follow up after a few days, and a few days after that.

Even better, we, the product team, would like to customize these messages a bit, depending on their team size, what license they have, etc. 
The operations team, who implement all outbound notifications, is rightfully a bit frustrated by this. They’re used to solving bugs and feature requests for the platform, not tweaking an email. Scheduling? Audience customization? This sounds like a job for….

## The CRM, where for a time it was good
With all the need for custom targeting, a good first solution is to have a signup get sent as an event to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool like Salesforce. From there, it’s easy to start a ‘signup campaign.’ Since the CRM should know things like the org size and license level of the user, the messages can be nicely customized.

And for a time, it was good. However, trouble starts when we go one step further with targeting and customization.

You see, our signup campaign encourages users to use certain features, like say Reports Export. We want to tell the users about the feature, demo it for them, walk them through the concept. “Please” our emails beg, “export your reports, with the Reports Export.”

This message will seem super weird if the user has already used Reports Export. So we, the product team, go to whomever runs the CRM and say ‘can we cancel this email if they’ve used Reports Export.’ Of course, the CRM doesn’t know that. So we end up back with platform engineering, asking them to send an event to the CRM when someone first uses Reports Export. 

The ‘quick and dirty’ solution of CRM wasn’t a durable solution to our problem.

### The problem is a ceding of territory
The inherent problem in the scenario above is a ceding of territory by the product team. If the product team wanted to move a button, or change the order of a toolbar, it wouldn’t make sense for the marketing team to say ‘no.’ But when we want to send a correctly targeted sign-up campaign, our reliance on our CRM means Marketing has to say ‘no’ to a better user experience.

Similarly, we wouldn’t let ops or platform engineering keep us from adding a helpful tooltip, but we are letting them keep us from sending a helpful email to the right users.

## What we can do to solve the problem
The problem here is a lack of tooling, either external or internal. Every new notification stream requires engineering time, and that means  technical limitations keep us from delivering the experience our users deserve.

Whether it’s by using Courier or an internal spike to create a messaging microservice, you want to develop a robust set of features that make it easy to send multiple notification types direct from your platform.


Courier is a notification service that centralizes all of your templates and messaging channels in one place which increases visibility and reduces engineering time. 

Start Routing Notifications Today!

birds build around a nest in a tree, but not inside it

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Your app has a whole other interface that has more impact on your users, that provides a deeper user experience than your application interface.

Your UX isn't in your app: the importance of notifications

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Building a Great UX Outside of your App

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Ryland Webb

Here at Courier, we recently announced a new focus on mobile notifications, which is the next big step to meeting our goals for our product. The biggest reason to focus on mobile is because it will drastically improve the user experience for anyone using mobile apps - which at this point, is everyone. This post explores the importance of building better quality mobile notifications and how to go about creating them.

## The potential of mobile push
In a perfect world, a mobile push notification would be the perfect mode of communication between app and user. It’s the ping that your ride is here, the notice that your takeout has been delivered, and the heads up that the airline ticket you were considering is the cheapest you should expect it to get. Well-crafted push notifications are timely, immediately actionable messages that cement the bond between users and the product. 

A 2017 study by Airship concluded there was a direct correlation between the frequency of your push notifications and your app’s retention rate. App users who received push notifications within their first 90 days had 190% higher retention rates than those who did not. Plus, frequent messaging could increase app retention rates by three to 10 times. It’s important to note that Airship is a push provider, so this isn’t exactly impartial research. But, it’s also worth noting that push notifications do consistently perform better than emails when it comes to click through rates and deliverability. Push notifications have open rates as low as 3.4% (average iOS performance via Swrve) and as high as 20% (BusinessofApps),depending on who you ask, as opposed to email’s [1-2%](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://reckless.agency/insight/email-vs-push-notifications-vs-in-app-messaging-which-has-the-highest-engagement/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1656007304687019&usg=AOvVaw1c05qtiRPMjRqNWTZWjLU0) open rate. 

So you have a notification channel (mobile push) that gets more interaction than other channels and could likely improve retention rates on your app - what’s stopping you from closing this article to send your users a push notification right now? Well, you’re amazing, and I’m sure your notifications are as well, but there are a lot of you’s out there, and it’s likely your user is already dealing with a plethora of notifications from them. 

## Learning from the history of push notifications
We’ve come a long way since the push notification was first invented in 2009. Today, these notifications are supported across Apple iOS, Google Android, Huawei Android, Amazon Echo, macOS, Windows, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Push notifications have evolved to include rich media, icons, customizable sounds, and up to four action buttons, among other developments. Today, the average US smartphone user receives [46 push notifications](https://www.businessofapps.com/marketplace/push-notifications/research/push-notifications-statistics/#:~:text=The%20average%20US%20smartphone%20user,Restraint%20can%20be%20key%2C%20therefore.) every day. 

For every study that speaks to the value of push notifications, there’s another that speaks to their risks and pains. A [2021 HelpLama survey](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://helplama.com/what-do-consumers-think-about-push-notifications-in-2021/%23:~:text%3Dfor%2520example%252C%2520a%2520significant%2520proportion%2520of%2520the%2520users%2520%25E2%2580%2593%252064%2525%252C%2520will%2520stop%2520using%2520an%2520app%2520entirely%2520if%2520it%2520sends%2520more%2520than%25205%2520weekly%2520push%2520notifications.%2520so%252C%2520app%2520marketers%2520need%2520to%2520tread%2520with%2520caution&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1656007304681959&usg=AOvVaw3WkXcHwx9Sa6c7Y2NKnnxf) of over 500 US-based smartphone users perfectly illustrates the fine line notifications need to walk in order to be deemed valuable. While the aforementioned Airship survey recommended sending daily push notifications to improve user retention, 43% of the users in this HelpLama survey said they would disable the app’s push notifications if they received two to five a week. 13% of survey participants said they’d hit disable if they saw even ONE push notification. And 64% of participants indicated that receiving daily notifications would motivate them to stop using an app entirely. 

At this point I’ll amend my topic sentence: a push notification is the perfect most polarizing mode of communication between app and customer. Assuming both push-positive 
and push-negative surveys are valid, how should you hold both in your mind as you plan your next push notification campaign? 

## How to send better mobile push notifications
### Send as few notifications as possible
Notifications are only valuable if they’re relevant. Since push notifications don’t have the typically ignored spam or promotions folders email providers have, app deletion is often seen as the best solution to unwanted pings. To avoid letting users come to this conclusion, I’d recommend taking a step back and writing down a question before you send that first message:

Is this notification necessary for my user’s success?

If so, really try to press yourself and ask why. If it’s still an essential notification, decide which action users should take when they see it, write some copy that points users towards that action and send that sucker. Push campaigns will be more successful when rolled out cautiously and thoughtfully. As you build the essential messaging in your campaign, you’ll be able to step back and analyze how this notification adds value, how different segments of users are responding, and how messaging frequency and language might be better tailored to 60+ demographics vs. the 18-29 demographic. Well-crafted push notifications are thoughtful nodes in the product ecosystem. Poorly designed push campaigns are bacterial spores.

### Context is everything
Within your user analysis, you should pick up details about when and where a user would like to be notified about your product. I know there’s a reason I receive more news articles in the morning and more pings from Netflix in the evening. These are the times of day I, and many users like me, are more likely to engage with those notifications. Netflix has a large team that has analyzed and optimized click-through rates across different time zones to create the strategy we see today. But this wouldn’t work for every engineer. 

If you’re wondering when a user would like to hear from you, there’s a good rule of thumb: let them tell you. Duolingo sends nudges to study a language the user has already indicated they’d like to learn. An e-commerce site like Boxed might send you a reminder to complete your purchase if you abandoned your cart midway through an order. A content platform like Courses is designed to serve push notifications to users when there are pauses in streaks - consecutive days during which users have listened to podcast snippets and completed daily practice exercises. In all of these examples, the product didn’t send a push until it felt confident it understood its users’ interests and behavior. 

If you want to read more about how to know what to say when, I wrote a [journey mapping article](https://www.courier.com/blog/journey-mapping-how-to-master-the-art-of-interrupting/) earlier that’s about crafting empathetic interruptions in your user’s experience. Feel free to check it out for some more context.

### Allow your users to set notification preferences
Allowing users to opt-in or opt-out, snooze, and schedule different categories of notifications can go a long way towards cultivating a user's trust in your product. This author has never been the biggest fan of the cortisol spikes he feels every time he receives a Slack notification, but the product does an incredibly good job offering granular preference control to their users all within the space of a modal. On top of the ability to join and leave channels (preference groupings in this context), users can schedule notifications, momentarily pause notifications, and even adjust their notifications sounds and appearance. This is of value to even the most skeptical push recipients. In the same HelpLama study referenced above, 61% of users will use the app more or at the same level if the notifications received are related to their preferences.

Aside from offering users a general sense of notification management, this level of granularity also offers important control to users with color and sound sensitivities. If the Slack “knock brush” default is grating to the ears, it can be changed to a ding, boing, drop, ta-da, or a female voice inexplicably saying “hummus”, among numerous other options. Slack also allows its users to decide whether or not they’d like to see a red unread badge when there are notifications waiting for them. In Twist, an app that positions itself as an alternative to those “burned out by real-time, all-the-time communication” they’ve done away with the red notification badge entirely because of the stress it induces. Whilehile Intercom offers moderated chat services that let users flag concerns about notifications they find obnoxious or distracting.

The future of mobile notifications is mindful, user-led communication. Check out how Courier is solving these problems by getting a [demo here](https://www.courier.com/features/mobile/).


The view from a car sees several stop options on the sides of the road over a pink backdrop of sky.

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The biggest reason to focus on mobile notifications is because it will improve UX for anyone using mobile apps - which at this point, is everyone.

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Designing the Perfect Mobile Push Notification

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Ilona Koren-Deutsch

Making sure your software and its documentation is accessible is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do—and it’s actually not that difficult. An accessible product is as usable as possible for everyone, regardless of their physical and cognitive abilities. For example, blind people should be able access your documentation with a screen reader, and neurologically atypical people shouldn’t be distracted by flashing screens, pop-ups, or carousels. 

All disabilities, whether permanent or temporary, can affect access to and use of your software. For many people, technology makes things easier. For people with disabilities, technology makes things possible. The general categories to account for in your design include auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. 

## Why do it?
Your company can have both measurable social impact and a healthy return on investment if you provide equal access to your products. Accessibility can:

* **Drive Innovation:** Accessibility features in products and services can solve unanticipated problems.

* **Enhance Your Brand:** Diversity and inclusion efforts are accelerated with a clear commitment to accessibility.
* **Extend Market Reach:** The global market of people with disabilities is over 2 billion people with a spending power of more than $6 trillion. 
* **Minimize Legal Risk:** Many countries have laws and many compliance standards have criteria requiring digital accessibility.
When accessibility is part of strategic planning, businesses are better equipped for success. A research study of Fortune 100 companies showed that disability inclusion, as part of an overall diversity strategy, is common practice among high performing businesses. 
(*[Disability as diversity in fortune 100 companies](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bsl.629)*. Ball, P., Monaco, G., Schmeling, J., Schartz, H., and Blanck, P.; Law, Health Policy and Disability Center (2005).)

### Drive innovation
By designing with a more diverse group of people in mind, you can develop better overall products and generate new ideas that will benefit all users. You might also uncover previously unthought of innovations that can have a measurable social impact. One example of accessible design leading to innovation for all is driverless cars. Driverless cars, which are promising for the independence of blind people, are also projected to help solve traffic fatalities and congestion.

Another example comes from academia. Research and development of the artificial retina project to help restore sight for people who are blind might also help future robots with real-time image-processing systems, effectively enabling them to “see.” 

Accessibility is closely related to general usability in that both aim to define and deliver a more intuitive user experience. User interaction design takes into account experiences other than screens when you consider accessibility. The result is interactions that are more human-centered, natural, and contextual.

Many companies use design thinking when developing products. Ideo describes design thinking as a discipline that brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.

Accessible design thinking provides varied and flexible ways for users to interact with products that can be useful for people with and without disabilities. Design thinking embraces seven core principles for participants: user-centric, collaborative, iterative, holistic, optimistic, experimental, and experiential. As you think about each of these principles, think about how accessibility can impact each one. For example, accessibility is a user-centric concept: it embraces all users, including those with disabilities. In implementing design thinking, remember to consider both the needs of your users with disabilities and the needs of your design thinking participants with disabilities.

### Enhance your brand
By developing accessible software, you demonstrate that you care about your customers as people.

A genuine commitment to accessibility is an important facet of demonstrating that your company has a sense of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Understanding and acting on the diverse needs of your stakeholders, both internal and external, can help create a brand that tells prospects you’re innovative, inclusive, and trustworthy. A Forrester survey commissioned by Microsoft features statements like, “Customers are aware of the needs of the people with disabilities and make purchasing decisions based on this kind of factor.” (*Assessing The Value Of Accessible Technologies For Organizations: A Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned By Microsoft*. June 2016.)

In addition, with a clear and integrated commitment to accessibility, you’ll enhance your internal culture and be able to hire the best people. To be successful in this endeavor, the technology that your employees use, including websites and applications, must be accessible. 

### Extend market reach
The market of people with disabilities is large, and it’s growing as the population ages. In the US alone, the annual discretionary spending of people with disabilities is over $200 billion. 

Consider the following facts when estimating market size. At least one billion people —15% of the world’s population—have a recognized disability. As the global population ages, many more people acquire a disability, which means that in countries with life expectancies of over 70 years of age, people spend 11.5% of their lifespan living with a disability. Globally, this market is estimated at 2.3 billion people who control $6.9 trillion in annual disposable income.

Think of it this way: Not having an accessible product is the modern-day equivalent of kicking out every fifth customer that enters your business.

Accessible product design often leads to improvements in general customer experience and thus customer loyalty. For customers with disabilities, such improvements are essential for equal access. Moreover, accessible design provides options that are useful to all customers in various situations. For example, accessible software benefits not only users with disabilities, but also:

* Older people with changing abilities due to aging
* People with “temporary disabilities” such as carpal tunnel syndrome, a broken arm, or lost glasses
* Users with challenging situations like bright, glaring sunlight or noisy environments

### Minimize legal risk
In many industries, accessibility is required for compliance. Even if your business is not legally required to be accessible, you might find that your customers are only permitted to work with companies that are compliant. Factoring in regulation, government oversight, and increased court action, the legal landscape is rapidly changing in favor of equal access.

Accessibility is a human right. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD) is a comprehensive human rights document that includes a direct reference to the rights of all people to have equal access to communications technology, which includes software as well as the web. Passed by the General Assembly of the UN, at last count more than 182 countries have ratified the CRPD. (As of 2021, the United States has signed, but not ratified, the treaty.)

The European Commission has adopted the European Accessibility Act, requiring ATMs and banking services, PCs, telephones and TV equipment, telephony and audiovisual services, transport, e-books, and e-commerce meet accessibility requirements. Australia, Canada, and other European countries have similar laws. Software is often included in these laws.

In the US, the number of lawsuits continues to rise, and courts increasingly decide in favor of equal access, often citing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If your product is used by the government, you also need to conform to Section 508, which covers a range of technology including electronic documents, software applications, web content, operating systems, and development frameworks. 

## Conclusion
Making software accessible is the right thing to do, and if you begin with accessibility in mind, it’s easier than going back and building it in later. It’s also good engineering practice to keep accessibility in mind from the start. Here at Courier, we are eager to dive into the project of making our own product more accessible. Admittedly, we’re not quite there yet, but we’re ready to get started! A few simple, but effective steps we plan to keep top-of-mind are:

* Familiarize ourselves with the [ARIA standards](https://webaim.org/techniques/aria/). The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities.
* Offer [real-time captioning](https://webaim.org/techniques/captions/realtime) for any of our live online content.
* Ensure our colors meet [minimum contrast requirements](http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/) everywhere, including this blog.

For more on accessibility such as how to engineer for accessibility and how you can use notifications to help your accessibility program, watch this space!


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An accessible product is usable for everyone, regardless of physical and cognitive abilities. Making an accessible product is the right and smart thing to do.

Why Making an Accessible Product is Important

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Why Software Accessibility Matters

Notifications are good for user experience. There, I said it. The word “notification” might conjure images of annoying interruptions for your users, but it should also remind them of moments where they were quietly guided to a more desirable experience. Notifications can guide users through key setup steps in onboarding, reward a positive interaction, and encourage exploration. They can stretch a product into an omnichannel experience and allow global brands to speak to each user as an individual. But notifications are only valuable to the user experience if they’re designed by the user experience - and it’s alarming how often this is ignored. 

Think about every push notification that’s duplicated in-app instead of being converted to a digest, and every gratuitous red circle you see on a mobile app just to find an impersonal event alert or system update in your inbox. Notification UX should be an extension of the core product UX but many brands fail to make the connection between the two. It’s possible this product was rolling out the door and the notification “strategy” was just a box the product team needed to check. Unfortunately, a failure to consider the complexity of notification UX could have huge consequences for the rest of the product. Poorly timed notifications are interruptions and impersonal messages are spam. Too many bad notifications can frustrate users, stall their progress, and even lead them to abandon your product entirely.

Fortunately there are many positive examples to look towards when designing your notification strategy. Even as I write this, I’m involved in positive interactions with four different brands. On my phone, I see an adorable photo of my dog covered by a push notification for a New York Times article I indicated I might be interested in when I signed up, a like on a recent Instagram post, a new post from a Medium blog I follow, and an alert that I’ve been signed out of my mobile banking app. I’m receiving all of these notifications because of an action I’ve initiated, so I’m not surprised to be seeing any of them (except for maybe the Instagram like, hardy-har-har). If I chose to open this NYTimes article about farm fisheries, smart reporting would allow the Times to identify that this is a topic I’m still interested in and I would expect them to alert me when similar stories are posted in the future. 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that these push notifications increase each of these brand’s retention rates.These apps are reaching out to me when I’m outside of their product, and I’m more likely to open their product because of the personalized messaging I’m seeing. Localytics observed that mobile apps with in-app messaging have a [30% better chance](https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/report-effective-in-app-messages-result-in-higher-retention/) of retaining users than apps without. Push notifications are also known to lift this retention rate and have a [97% higher response rate](https://blog.getsocial.im/getting-the-most-out-of-push-notifications-to-improve-user-retention/) than emails. Furthermore, best practice states users are more likely to be nurtured from new to advanced if they’re fed a balanced diet of omnichannel notifications.

So how should you go about designing your notifications? Before you hit send, sit down and ask the following questions. As a proof of concept, I’ll run through this exercise with you. I work as a product designer for Courier, which is working on a single platform for designing, orchestrating, and routing notifications over users’ favorite channel providers for email, SMS, chat, mobile push, and more. So I’ll be running through these questions with one of the personas we design for.

## Who is your user?

Who is the user we’re targeting and what’s driving their journey? It’s important you establish the persona and goal and stick with that so your insights are clearer and more actionable. 

You can do this with any persona at any stage in their customer journey. For our Courier POC, I’ll try designing notifications for Amanda, a recently onboarded user who is still setting up parts of her account. She would like to see value in the product before she becomes a regular user.

## Why are they here?

Pull out the post-its and ask why this user is on this journey in the first place. Odds are, there will be a wide range in responses covering everything from high-level goals to small pain points. Try to group all the similar ideas together so you can make as cohesive a story as possible. In the case of our recently onboarded persona, Amanda, she might have signed up for Courier because she was having difficulty with Cross-functional collaboration, single-channel routing, and editing copy in the code.

Tying these pain points to a higher level goal will help ensure your user story is cohesive and clear. For instance, if I saw Amanda’s list of issues, I might say Amanda’s looking to simplify notification management for her entire team. Together, her scenario might read something like this:

“Amanda and her team are frustrated by their inability to edit the copy in their notification code. Furthermore, they feel a sense of dread everytime they need to send an existing notification to a new channel or share a build with a teammate. As her team grows, she’s looking for a platform that will simplify the management of their existing system and easily scale to meet their needs.”

## What are they thinking and feeling?

Now I can take this story and map how Amanda is thinking and feeling during her Courier onboarding. Based on her back story, we can hypothesize that Amanda will begin to see value in Courier when she sees her teammates sending multi-channel notifications. Therefore, I can plot her journey to that moment and think about the messaging we should show her along the way. 

![user journey](//images.contentful.com/z7iqk1q8njt4/3ByEr2GYluoJBzNMf2wDP/f2d4bf4415282e248c0bcef331ea4562/image1.png)

Whether you’re doing this with a team or solo, I’d recommend keeping the post-its and markers out so that this brainstorm feels collaborative and easy to adjust. As you ask what Amanda is thinking and feeling during each step of her journey, you should also start identifying where she may run into confusion or frustration. Where does the journey have potential growing pains? Where might things not work as expected? What is Amanda’s current solution to this pain? What is the impact of this pain point? Is it painful enough that it might cause Amanda to abandon your product entirely?

At each step of the journey, you should indicate which channel your user is using. Are they using desktop or mobile? Are they even using your product at a certain step? In our featured example, we can assume Amanda will complete her initial onboarding steps in Courier - signing up, inviting teammates, creating a first notification - but other steps in her journey, like learning that a teammate joined or hearing that a teammate successfully made an edit to her template, will likely occur when she’s outside the product. How can we craft a notification to give the validation and assurance she needs without becoming an interruption?

I’d recommend charting a sentiment line as you go through this exercise so you can fully visualize the highest highs and the lowest lows in the current journey. Even if the sentiment line looks pretty flat throughout, that’s an opportunity to design a notification that will lift the mood.

## Where would notifications be valuable?

You’ll want to take a step back and absorb your user journey at a high level. Where are the areas of greatest confusion? Where is the journey falling short of expectations? Are there any user needs that haven’t been met?

![Amanda's User Journey](//images.contentful.com/z7iqk1q8njt4/2TBaIV5DSIbAngXl433zcz/007a98d3d0b2a34287ded7d4b91423bb/image2.png)

In Amanda’s case, we notice dips in the sentiment line and possible confusion in steps 5, 6, and 9. Thanks to this exercise, we can identify these steps as blindspots in the journey that can be improved by notifications. In steps 5 and 6, we can add in-app notifications that alert her when her invitations were accepted, and her new teammates are designing, editing, and sending notifications. We’ll also want to point her to her in-app preferences where she can snooze or opt out of these notifications so they don’t become too overwhelming. In step 9, we should create an email that shows her team trends on a weekly or monthly basis so that she can feel confident that Courier is helping her team scale. The combination of all of these notifications should improve Amanda’s experience and increase the likelihood we shepherd her to the “a-ha” moment that will make her a regular user of our product.

If you’ve finished all these steps, you’ve just built a journey map. It won’t guarantee perfect messaging in every notification, but it’ll point your team in the right direction. By taking the time to walk a mile in your user’s shoes, you can feel confident that you are only providing messaging where it’s wanted. From here, we can implement these notifications and test different messaging to see which speaks to Amanda the best. 

At the end of the day, notifications are good for the user experience, but only if they’re informed by the user experience. Hopefully this serves as a gentle reminder to build the bridge between the two. Check out this guide on [User Requirements](https://www.courier.com/blog/the-developers-guide-user-requirements/) when thinking about notification design.

Try Courier out for yourself. [Sign up](https://app.courier.com/signup) and start sending out delightful notifications. 

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Too many bad notifications frustrate users and lead them to abandon your product entirely. Notifications are only valuable to UX if they’re designed by UX.

Courier [User Experience]

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