Preventing a flooded inbox
Heard is an all-in-one online communications platform for preK-5 schools that enables engagement for parents, educators and school administrators.
Heard, in its goal of keeping users informed and engaged was over-doing its efforts by sending too much information to users. The founders were receiving feedback from parents about being overwhelmed and were worried about users leaving the app.
And the founders' worries were right
Our first step was going deep into user research and, as part of the process we conducted user interviews and usability testing with parents.
We discovered the founders concerns were correct, parents were overwhelmed; their inboxes were getting flooded. They were receiving too many notifications/emails continuously throughout the day with invitations to events, requests for volunteering, teacher's announcements and also emails per every comment made to any of those posts and messages.
Another interesting insight that we gained from this exercise was that most parents knew there was a way to adjust their notification settings but had not tried to do so.
Approach
We decided that a good approach to this problem was to understand what topics parents cared about the most. This would provide us with a way to prioritize the information on the newsfeed and on the notifications sent to them.
We used card sorting with parents in order to determine what they considered relevant information. The result was a list with different types of posts organized by relevance. We realized that parents prioritize posts created by group administrators over community posts.
We used these insights to redesign the notification settings and the newsfeed.
Exploring options for notification settings from simple to more granular version - LoFi Wireframes
Reducing noise
Taking into account our findings from the card sort exercise, we created wireframes for the notification settings exploring different ideas like:
- Having an easy and fast way to manage the bulk of notifications
- Giving the user more power in personal customization making the settings more granular
- Modifying the frequency of the notifications.
While performing usability testing the simplest version of the notification settings was rated higher than the granular version. Parents wanted a way to receive less notifications without having to get too involved in managing their notification settings.
The major change for the notification settings was categorizing the posts into posts created by group administrators and posts created by the general community giving the user a choice for the kind of notifications they want to receive.
Default settings with the most relevant information
The notification settings were set to the highest level by default, meaning that a first-time user would receive all the notifications/emails at all times. The founders had thought this would be beneficial for the users as they wouldn't miss any information but it was actually being detrimental; the users reacted by feeling overwhelmed, disengaging with the app or simply changing the notifications settings to none (they wouldn't change the frequency to low but immediately switched to none).
We recommended the founders to adjust the default settings to receive notifications from MODERATORS ONLY instead of receive ALL notifications.
Reducing clutter with post categories
The old newsfeed offered the options to create: post, event, photo, announcement or private groups.
Using the insights from card sorting and user interviews, we explored the idea of using posts categories as a way to declutter the newsfeed.
After prototyping, performing usability testing and collecting feedback from users and stakeholders, we narrowed down the categories from seven (our first iteration) to three based on frequency of use and relevance and created a bar where the user could easily access to them.
We were able to determine that "post" as a category could include questions, general comments and also, photos, links and alerts (before called announcements).
We used icons and labels to represent the different categories so that users could scan and quickly find the information they thought most relevant. We also did this thinking to add filter capability in the newsfeed.
Make a difference through vocabulary
Announcements were a type of post which goal was to alert about important/urgent messages to all the users of the app. Nevertheless, it was being misused most of the time by users who didn’t understand or not cared enough about the concept and reach of this type of post. Announcements had lost importance.
In order to keep announcements meaningful on the platform we changed their name to "Alert" and changed their location under general posts, making it less obvious (and less tempting to click on them). We created a pop-up window that appears once the alert symbol is clicked with instructions on how alert posts should be used and as a reminder that all users in the groups would be notified immediately no matter what type of notification settings they have selected previously.
Happier parents
No more flooded inboxes + no more fear of missing out = happier parents
In our validation testing, we found that parents felt a decrease in the information overload that they were experiencing before. Having the posts organized by categories allow them to filter and to quick scan through the newsfeed for what they really cared about and the new notification settings and defaults decreased the amount of unwanted unimportant emails on their inboxes.
Receiving so many messages was generating a lot of anxiety and fear of missing out on important information about their kids. The decrease in emails/notifications reduced the anxiety of feeling that they could miss something important if they didn't read all the messages which translated then in happier parents.