When is a push notification useful?

Push notifications can be switched off – something that many users have been doing for a long time, but something that companies naturally want to avoid. You should therefore think carefully in advance about when and to what extent notifications are useful in your own app. A concept is essential for this. It is worth thinking about this early on in the development process and taking the time to carefully clarify the sense (or nonsense) of notifications as part of your app. In addition to estimating the technical and financial outlay, this also includes asking about the purpose for the user.

In principle, there is one central question that needs to be answered carefully before jumping into the programming of notifications: What is the purpose of the notification? Is it “just” about getting users to interact or do I provide important content and an effective benefit? And if so, what? Am I only benefiting myself or the company, or do my users also gain added value from the planned notifications? As with the design of the app as a whole, it is important to never lose sight of the user’s perspective.

If the user sees no purpose behind the message on their screen, they will almost certainly deactivate it fairly quickly. Probably the worst reason to send a notification to a user is to get them to use the app – in other words, to force interaction. This also shows why a concept that already includes the question of push notifications is important: The app itself should provide a benefit for the user! If it becomes necessary to persuade users to open the app with a push notification, then the central aspect of the app should probably be reconsidered. If the user feels coerced or forced to use the app, in the worst case scenario they will delete the entire app.

The second question relates to personalization. Should the relevant notifications be sent to all users or is personalization necessary due to different parameters? If so, why? On the one hand, the focus here is of course once again on the benefit for the user, but the development budget also determines the possibilities here. Personalized notifications are technically more complex to implement, which must be taken into account in the design.

The third question that arises is the type of notification. In an earlier post, we summarized the different possibilities of notifications – you can find them here. Depending on the purpose and budget, a different method is recommended.

In addition, the release of iOS 15 brought new possibilities to smartphones – for example, users can now prioritize notifications from certain apps or bundle them into collected “summaries”. The organization of notifications is therefore increasingly being handed over to users – making it all the more important for developers to give notifications a higher priority and take them into account accordingly in content planning.

Just as with the question of authorization release, the timing and scope are also decisive for push notifications(you can find out more about permission handling here).

It should always be clear to the user why they are receiving a push message. It is also important to explain why they are receiving this message. This question is of course superfluous for news apps, but for all other applications it makes sense to provide more input.

Even if a small message on the user’s screen seems like a “simple thing”, setting up push notifications is very time-consuming and more complex than you might think. It takes two weeks of programming to implement a notification that is sent to all users without segmentation. However, if you want to give users the option of switching off the notifications, perhaps even segmenting them, this quickly becomes even more complex. It is therefore worth considering in advance in what form and for what purpose the app should be provided with notifications: It’s better to have no push notifications than ones that only spam the user without being of any use to them.