Notifications are embedded into almost all of our online and in-app experiences.
Your bank notifies you when your account balance is low. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook notify you if you’ve been tagged in a post. Slack notifies you when someone’s reacted or responded to a message you sent. And now, you can easily add notifications to your B2B SaaS product thanks to Cord’s new Notification components: Notification List and Notification List Launcher.
Before we explore when, how, and why to use Cord’s Notifications, let’s start with a bit of background on notifications more broadly, and why they’re surprisingly tricky to build.
The purpose of notifications is both simple and intuitive: to alert users of something relevant to them specifically, and make it easy for them to learn more. This encourages engagement within an application.
Seems simple enough, right? Wrong.
The toughest part involves answering the all-important (but difficult-to-answer) question: how and when should we notify users? Here’s a taste of what you might need to consider…
Source: Slack
The bottom line: there’s nothing worse than being notified about something you already saw, or being notified several times about the same thing via different channels. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar 🙋♀️
Your dad tries to call you. When you don’t pick up, he leaves you a voicemail. He follows that voicemail up with a text message saying “Hey, just tried to call you.” Now you have a missed call notification, a text message notification, and a voicemail notification. Talk about overkill. This illustrates just how quickly notifications can turn into noise.
Back to the workplace…
For notifications to be effective and drive engagement, they have to be relevant, customizable, and never, ever spammy.
Why? Because if you notify users too much, they’ll either become so desensitized to the notifications that they’ll ignore them, or they’ll become so overwhelmed by the never-ending barrage of alerts that they’ll unsubscribe to them altogether.
For example, the average person doesn’t want to be notified about every single message and every single channel they subscribe to…but when someone first joins a new workplace and isn’t terribly active, amplifying existing activity will help encourage them to get more involved.
Likewise, it might make sense for everyone who has access to a particular document to be notified of activity (a comment, reply, reaction, etc.) if there are only three people with access. But this changes considerably when all 550 people at a company have access.
There’s an infinite number of scenarios to consider, and users’ stated and demonstrated preferences vary. (We told you it was tricky!) Fortunately, Cord and our talented bench of PMs and developers have done the hard work so you don’t have to.
With this component, users can see all the notifications they have related to replies, reactions, or people @mentioning them across your app. And, thanks to our REST API, you can also programmatically add custom notifications that aren’t triggered by a Cord-specific action. It could be a notification about a security update or a task being completed. Whatever makes sense for your product, and your users.
Regardless of the notification type, they appear in a scrolling list where your customers can track when the notification was generated and review/update read states.
In addition to customizing parameters related to the size and style of the list, and if/when these notifications get sent via Slack or email, you can also customize the following properties:
Check out our Docs for more info.
Notification badges (traditionally red dots in the top right corner of your favorite app) have been triggering dopamine releases for over a decade.
As the name suggests, Cord’s Notification List Launcher displays a button that will open and close the Notification List when clicked. It will be badged in real-time when relevant notifications appear, saving you the trouble of managing that state.
Check out our docs to see all the styling and badging types you can control.
Want to add Cord’s Notification List and Notification List Launcher to your product? Explore our docs to see how to customize and implement each component, or get in touch with us to learn more.
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