Notifications

Registry notifications is a feature that informs registrants of reminders of communication around product availability and gifts purchased.

My role

UI/ UX design

Design Strategy

Competitive Audit

User Research

Design Handoff

Device

Mobile

Tablet

Desktop

Duration

4 weeks

Target Users

Registrants that are…

Just Starting Out

Doesn’t live together. They do not have anything. They have hand me down products. Consolidating and rethinking everything. Figuring out each other's long term style. Figuring out where you will live.

Example Personas

• Doesn’t live together or have not lived together long

• Registrant, living in a Small Spaces and just starting out

• Younger couple, first marriage 

Problem

The Registrant does not have a clear place they can go for all registry notifications. They are currently missing key notifications.

Registrants are frustrated that a lot of items on their registry are going out of stock or are discontinued.

Registrants are annoyed by items being purchased off their registry but they never receive the products.

How might we…make registry alert communication more streamlined and frictionless for the Registrant on site.

Goal

Create more transparency to registrants on gifts purchased off their registry and items that need their attention. Registry notifications will be a central place for communicating important information to the registrant while also grabbing their attention when on our site. A phase 2 goal is to create a central place for all notification types (my offers, my orders, my idea boards etc)

Objective

Decrease call-outs with products that need action like discontinued items and create more satisfaction for managing alerts within the registry experience

Challenge

Understand the current different types of notifications and future potential notifications

Building a product that is flexible for all future notification types

Considering trigger based vs time base notifications

Discovery

I ran a discovery session with my product manager, business analyst and engineers to come up with different ideas around notifications. These were some ideas, but in the session we came up with over 100 ideas. These are some high level ideas of types of notifications that would be helpful to registrants.

Registrants may want notifications around…

Registrant customer journey

I created a customer journey map to understand the events that happen for the registry during the registry experience. Notifications can be created around where registrants are in their journey.

User testing

We asked 10 customers to provide general feedback around notifications/usage on a mobile device, engaging with notifications on Facebook vs Amazon.

Some of the things we tried to understand...

What is a meaningful notification?

What levels of controls do users need?

Do users take action on notifications?

Insights

• Customers told us users like receiving notifications about things that pertain to them on a personal level. For ex messages from friends, friends requests, dating app messages, someone tagged them in a post.

• Users do not like to receive notifications around sales because they feel that when they’re interested in buying an item, they can actively go search for those sales themselves.

• When describing what they thought of notification center was most imagined it to be a location within that app where they could edit their settings or see all their notifications they had recently viewing

• Users want to expect a high level of control over the notifications they receive from an app, whether that’s through the in- app settings or their device

User Flow and low level wires

I created a user flow and low level wires to start to think through the customer journey.

Lo Fi Wires

Hi Fidelity and Round 2 of User testing

After some quick low fi wires I created hi fidelity wires that I validated with user testing

In Round 2 I tested 3 different experiences.

1. V1 The entry point was through the Nav main nav. See visual below.

2. V2 Entry point in My Account

3. V3 Entry point is in Registry sticky bar.

V1 Entry point in the nav was the most on-the-mark for users because users thought the clarity of the global bell and details of the notifications with the image, title and date was most clear

MVP vs Future State

Based on this work being rolled out to just the Registry audience, business decided they wanted to do a soft launch where we would roll out the feature in my account first. Business would monitor if registrants interacted and discovered the notifications.

In the future state, we would look at rolling out the notifications feature at a global nav level like the designs above. Notifications would be about all types, not just registry.

Constraints

Due to design system limitation the final design had restrictions and could not look exactly like the above since it lived in my account. The designs had to adhere to existing components and typography. The future state we will be able to have the notifications look like the above.

Outcome

Decrease in customer callouts from the Registrant about items that were out of stock and discontinued.

7% Increase in add to registries for example to replace items that were discontinued or out of stock.

“I love when I get registry notifications, so I know right away when items go out of stock or are discontinued. I can quickly take action and replace the item, so my guest are less frustrated.”

Bed Bath & Beyond Wedding Registrant

Next Steps

In a future state, I would like to clean up some design systems outdated text styles, ui and components, so I can modernize the look and feel. Due to the aggressive project plan this was not in scope and I had to use the existing outdated framework.

I would also like to move notification to a global feature into the nav, so it has more general discoverability and maps back to the user testing research. I will continue to push this as a global feature for all  notification types such as (my offers, my orders, my idea boards etc.) and future registry notification types.