Building email notifications - how often should they trigger?
Morning everyone!
Hope you're all enjoying a nice Saturday. I'm currently sitting by my laptop enjoying a nice hot chocolate and cracking on with some early morning work. Life isn't ALL bad right now!
I'm building an email notification system for my product Bolt.
It'll work something like this:
- When a user adds feedback / replies to feedback, it'll trigger an email notification to A. the person who created the board (when feedback is added), or B. the person who is receiving the reply.
One problem is email notification overload, if someone receives 12 feedback comments, I don't want them to receive 12 emails from Bolt.
I'm trying to work out the best UX for this - would it make sense to create these email notifications on a timer, e.g. limit email notifications to 1 per 10 minutes maximum? If so, do you have any recommendations for how often this timer should reset?
Thanks all!
Trending on Indie Hackers
Maybe if there are 15 feedback comments in 30 minutes, they will get a email saying “You have 15 pieces of feedback” or something like that. Then, every 30 minutes it will check for notifications. If there are some, it will send the email, if not then it will ignore it.
Ah yeah I didn't consider an automated check. Maybe I'll trigger an email on the first notification and then do a check every X mins after. Thanks for the suggestion! :)
No problem. Glad I could help :)
Man i love your landing page design. Did you do it yourself? Really like the mock ups of the product too.
On the topic, I think options are great for the user. Email for replies and a summary after an hour.
Thanks! I did design it myself. I created it in Webflow. I've actually become apathetic to it, working on a very slightly updated version now!
Awesome. Just started on a webflow site too. Did you use one template? or did you pull together different template elements to make your pages?
Would love to hear your tips for working with webflow.
I'm a UX/UI designer so I just created everything from scratch :). Lots of great templates to use though!
Let users decide through options like:
a) send me a daily digest
b) notify me when someone replies
For b) I'd run it on a timer and send an email every X minutes saying Y new replies.
X ultimately depends on how critical it is for the user to be notified at speed, if it's important then batch them around 10-15 minutes.
Giving users control is definitely my ultimate goal. I think a timer is the way to go for a beta version!
Working out when to send notifications is hard! Too many and people start tuning them out but not enough and they may miss something important. Maybe do a digest email and let users select how often they want to get it? So for sites with low activity someone could select once a day and for high activity they could choose to receive it once an hour?
I definitely want to work towards allowing users to tweak how often they receive notifications (e.g. every X minutes or a daily digest). Going to build an initial version which triggers every 15-20mins first. Thanks for your comment!
Sounds like there’s two workflows here? A reply and a summary for the Board Owner?
A reply to a conversation is well established imo. You’ll probably get an email from indiehackers, either with this reply or saying “you have a reply”.
But the board owner should get a summary for the sounds of it. Not 100% sure but maybe the content and frequency of the summary will vary person to person? So maybe a toggle of slider “email me every {x} days”
I guess there are two workflows:
• A feedback comment
• A reply to a comment
I think they can be handled with the same email though. Still working through this!