NOTIFICATIONS BEFORE

Sprout Social’s Notifications problem was two-fold:

1. User Experience: Without a centralized Notification Center, users didn’t have a dedicated space to find, review, and act on pertinent information resulting in frustration. Additionally, users did not have the ability to manage delivery preferences for opting in/out of notifications. In the ‘Before’ screenshot you can see three icons in the upper left hand corner of the old interface, each containing counts for notifications from a specific area of the application. Those icons’ notifications all had different styles and varying levels of actionability (ie click into, read-only, etc). While these icons + notifications were all at least at the top of the navigation, there were several more instances of notifications not accounted for here hidden throughout the various pages of the web application.

2. Technical: Over the years, various development teams had created dozens of scrappy one-off service solutions for delivering notifications to users within their siloed product areas. This culminated in a tangled system of disparate notifications services which became increasingly difficult to understand, maintain, measure, and support.

ALPHA ➞ BETA ➞ GENERAL AVAILABILITY

Through both notification usage metrics and initial customer research, it became clear that change management was a critical consideration for the new Notifications Center given that users heavily relied on the previously existing notification locations to receive workflow-critical information. Due to this, I composed a multi-phase release strategy identifying and inviting select power users of various notification types into a formal beta program to receive feedback on every milestone of development starting with static designs through in-production POCs. The usage trends we observed and the feedback we received directly from beta users was critical in developing our general availability solution below, which we released to all users.

NOTIFICATIONS AFTER

Accomplished Objectives

1. User Experience:

   1. Introduced a new Notifications Center in Sprout space for users to receive, act on, and archive all of their notifications across groups and product areas

   2. Released Notification Features within the Notification Center such as bulk actions (ie mark all as read), filtering, sorting, and searching to make users’ overall experience with notifications more effective

   3. Enabled users to self-configure settings in a new Notification Preferences Center for more control over factors such as which notifications they’d like to receive and how they’d like to receive them (web app, mobile, email)

2. Technical / Organizational:

   1. Established notification standards by defining stylistic uniformity, usage criteria, and best practices for Sprout notifications for increased consistency of existing notifications and efficiency for net-new notification creation

   2. Provided internal users (ie teams and developers) with an centralized, extendable Global Notifications Service to deliver additional types of Notifications to their customers as needed

   3. Created and released a new internal Developer Tool: LaunchPad, for teams to more quickly create, test, and deploy new Notifications through the Global service.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Credit must be shared with the various, fantastic individuals who have helped shape and actualize the products referenced above. Namely, Nicki Stearns (Product Designer), Shane Brunson (Software Engineer), Divya Balasubramanian (Software Engineer), Patrick Gombert (Software Engineer), Derek Brower (Software Engineer), Jordan Cumming (Quality Assurance Engineer).

Here are some photos of that amazing team listed above swinging at a Notifications Bell Piñata that I had commissioned to help celebrate the release.