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UX Product Designer ·
connecting data and human experiences to create a user friendly experience.
August 2020 - January 2021
Visual Designer, UX Designer, Interaction Designer, UX Researcher
iOS Mobile
Most people especially those in the 18-25 year old age group said that they have a lot of notifications during the day that overwhelm them and rather than manage it, usually they just clear their notifications after an extended period of time.
Unnecessary Screen Time
Young adults feel like they have a tough time concentrating because they are constantly checking their phones.
Information Overload
Young adults felt like they were overwhelmed because they have to filter through unnecessary notifications to find the ones they deem important.
How might we help young adults better manage their screen time and reduce their cognitive load?
Priority notifications is a new adaptation on how notifications would behave and be managed, specifically on iOS in this prototype. This new adaptation will allow users to quickly filter and scan through their notifications to reduce unnecessary screen time. It prioritizes showing alerts from apps that are important to the user. The goal of this new implementation is to avoid unnecessarily alerting the users by allowing the phone to learn what the user values. In doing this, it will decrease the cognitive load and distractions that the user faces daily.
1
Users would select at the most 8 apps that they deem as essential and want to prioritize the notifications from them.
2
The selected apps will be at the top of the screen on a dock so that it's quickly accessible to the user.
3
Users can filter out alerts by selecting one of the apps at the top of the screen which will show them alerts from that app only.
1
Users set a time period where they won't want to be bothered to get their batch of irrelevant notifications.
2
Only prioritized app's notifications will alert the user when it's in the do not disturb mode.
3
After that set time has passed, the user will get one notification that will show them all the notifications they missed.
Priority apps are applications that a user chooses that sit at the top of the notification center. They can choose up to 8 applications to prioritize. Priority apps help the phone discern what is important to the user and allows notifications from those apps to behave differently.
When a priority app is clicked, it will filter the notification center showing alerts from that specific app. It will allow the user to scan unmanaged alerts from that app and reduce their cognitive load by sorting it for them. It will also reduce screen time by decreasing the time it takes to look for the important notifications.
Batched notifications is a feature that works in conjunction with priority apps. It will block out alerts from unprioritized apps and show them in a batch after a certain amount of time has elapsed. This time frame can be set by the user. During the time frame, it only shows the most recent notification if it’s a prioritized app or phone call. The rest of the screen is black to reduce the distractions and the user’s cognitive load.
A mode that was intended to sleep with out disruptions in the middle of the night is repurposed for time away from phones in general day to day usage. Many people feel like they have to many alerts going off during the day so they put their phone on do not disturb when they need to concentrate.
Productivity is increased
Notifications aren't disturbing the user
Easy to toggle on and off
Misses important notifications
Needs to do a lot of set up to allow certain apps
Doesn't resolve cognitive overload
A setting that is AI driven to suggest to its users applications that might be giving them notifications that the AI deems irrelevant due to the lack of interaction.
Doesn't alert the user of notifications from unnecessary apps
AI suggests apps to have notifications as deliver quietly
Facebook Groups
Many people don't know this feature exists
Doesn't resolve cognitive overload
Go into every apps settings to set it to deliver quietly or rely on AI to appear with the alert
Information Overload
Both solutions don't resolve the issue of cognitive overload because users still need to manage their notifications and filter through the ones that are irrelevant.
How users interact with their notifications?
How they felt about their notifications/ screen time?
How they prioritized their notifications?
We conducted a user survey where we collected 67 responses. I also conducted 5 out of 12 user research interviews.
User survey:
12 questions
3 questions background questions for the user
4 questions about how they feel about the current features and behaviors their notifications provide
5 questions on how and how often they interact with their notifications
User Research Interviews:
23 questions
7 questions background questions for the user
1 question about what device they had the most screen time on
8 questions on how the react to notifications
5 questions about their feelings toward their screen time and whether they meet their own expectations
2 questions about how users have tried to reduce their screen time
Limitations: Due to limited time and resources, it was difficult to avoid convenience sampling because we shared surveys using our social media. This reduced our scope to young adults because 89.5% of our respondents were in the age range of 18-25. We also catered to iOS because 91.2% of the response we received used iOS as their operating system.
As a team, we began to place our thoughts onto post its and began to synthesize our data by finding patterns and consolidating them into key insights.
🔑 Young adults want more relevant notifications to be brought to their attention.
Young adults feel like their notifications don’t serve their purpose. Many interviewees mentioned that they felt like their notifications have become ad spaces for apps to draw more users in with deals.
Very intrusive, too 'click-baity', too many, some are not beneficial to me
Lately, I have been feeling intruded by the notifications, however, I don't want to miss out on anything. If I decided to turn on notifications for an app, it became a commitment to be notified not only for utility purposes, but also ads and attention grabbers from the app itself. I'm not given the options to choose.
Well, I've basically disabled 99% of all push notifications since they were distracting (except for text, and some other important things) so I really enjoy not having a notification pop up every few minutes. Before making this change though, notifications were extremely distracting and broke my state of flow when doing work.
🔑 Young adults want to reduce unnecessary screen time caused by insignificant alerts.
Young adults feel like they are checking phone unnecessarily and it's incredibly distracting to them when trying to do their work.
It can be annoying sometimes since it keeps going off
I dislike applications that send pointless notifications, such as Starbuck sales or "Coming Soon" on Netflix. These notifications clutter my phone, and can make me check my phone unnecessarily.
🔑 Young adults want more relevant notifications to be brought to their attention.
Young adults feel like there isn't any prioritization within the notifications that are presented to them. This increases their cognitive load because they have to spend time filtering through their alerts.
Sometimes it gets overwhelming and it doesn’t always show things that i would consider most important first.
They can be too many sometimes and I would like to filter them out.
I sometimes get too many notifications so my notification center gets cluttered and overwhelming
As our product will ultimately utilize both digital and physical platforms, we decided to focus on producing a digital prototype of our mobile app for now.
Priority Notifications started as a filtration method for notifications. I picked 4 apps because the dock on top was inspired by the iOS dock at the bottom of the home screen. The main purpose was to allow users to pick what they valued and could quickly find alerts from those apps. This would resolve the issue people had about notifications being overwhelming.
After further brainstorming, I added batch notifications as part of priority notifications in order to address the issue about not getting important notifications if users put their phone on do not disturb. An article that looked at how to improve the well being by adjusting notifications stated, “Compared to those in the control condition, participants whose notifications were batched three-times-a-day felt more attentive, productive, in a better mood, and in greater control of their phones.”
Priority Notifications when it's being in a concentration mode and only shows the most recent notification that is prioritized
Once the screen is turned on either when the concentration mode time has elapsed or when the person wakes up the device manually.
An example of an app being prioritized. Depicting that one app's notifications are sorted. Added the show all notifications button to return back to home screen.
From the low fidelity prototype, I utilized the iOS 13 UI Kit in order to make a realistic mock up for the high fidelity design.
This is what it would look like in the concentration mode. One notification presented at a time and only "prioritized" apps would be able to bypass this silenced mode.
I added labels that would show what are new notifications that are part of the new batch. Here's what the new lock screen/ notification center looks like.
When a priority app is pressed there is a highlight around the app. The show all notifications stays at the top to not intrude and block text from notifications.
Concentration mode
Concentration mode allows the users to be less distracted by only allowing prioritized apps to alert the user. It also only shows the most recent notification from a prioritized app. This will mitigate the amount of times a person checks their phone because they won't be alerted as often.
Batched Notifications
After a certain time frame has passed, all the notifications from unprioritized apps that have accumulated during that time frame will all be sent as one "batch" to alert the user. For example, after 1 hour has passed, the phone will alert the user with one ding and show them everything they missed during that hour.
Priority Apps Filter
The filter will allow users to feel less overwhelmed because they can filter out the notifications from one specific app. This will make sure they're not spending lots of time scrolling through their notification centers looking for an important notification that got buried under a sea of irrelevant notifications.
Here's a quick demo of the first iteration. It was only prototyped to have on priority app work for quick usability testing.
I conducted 10 usability tests where I had the users explore and talk through their thought process as they shared their screen over zoom. I wanted to see if they would get confused at certain points and made notes of them.
We wanted our users to be able to go through 3 primary processes:
Get out of concentration mode
Filter notifications
Manage notifications
Users were sent a Figma link to the prototype and observed as they walked through five tasks:
After a simulation of time has passed, user needs to exit concentration
Click on a priority app to filter out notifications
Manage those notifications
Go back to showing all notifications.
Talk about what they are thinking or doing while interacting with the prototype
I get overwhelmed because I don’t check it (notifications) often so this helps me
I really like the design and it's seamlessly and fits into current iOS design
Yeah, there have been situations that have arisen where I was waiting for an important email from my professor, but got notifications from Domino's
From the user testing conducted, we learned:
4 priority apps is not enough
Many people expressed that they wanted more than 4 priority apps because they felt like they prioritized more than 4 apps.
Can't see the show all button
The 'Show all notifications' button was hard to discern from the background due to its low contrast ratio.
Need to scroll up to see 'show all notifications' button
Many people also mentioned that they didn’t like that the button wasn't persistent and needing to scroll to the top just to return to see their other notifications.
Number of Priority apps went from 4 to 8.
Many people wanted more. Some suggested that we allowed folders in the dock to group certain types of apps together to allow more filtration. Most people arrived at the conclusion between 5-6 priority apps would be enough. Since this was inspired by the bottom dock we chose to double it and make the maximum amount of priority apps 8. I didn’t want to add more since the dock already took up a majority of the lock screen. However, we still wanted the user to be able to choose so there is no minimum for priority apps. We thought the folder idea was interesting but ultimately scrapped it since it would lead to sub menus that would add cognitive load.
Using the blue iOS button to guide users better and solve contrast issue.
For the show all button, we decided to use the blue button that iOS uses because it would seem more inviting for the user to press it. It would help guide the user to view at all their other notifications that they missed if they wanted to manage those too. The blue button also solved the low contrast issue from the first button.
Button is now persistent and has improved reachability.
I also moved the button to the bottom for reachability purposes and kept it persistent so that users wouldn't have to scroll all the way up or down to press it.
Let's become more universal!
Android has a majority of mobile phone user base so I would like to visually adapt this to Android. However, more research is needed to learn the nuances of Android design language for smoother integration.
More inclusive data!
I felt like my design was predominantly catering to 18-25 year olds who used iOS because that was data presented. I would like to get more data in order to create a more inclusive solution that caters to multiple operating systems and age groups.
Prioritize more!
I can make dock pages in order to make more than 8 priority apps. We can also reduce the size of it to show 4 at a time.
Jump into the App!
Since most people can do more in the app, adding a button to directly open the app would be helpful.