A practical checklist for push notifications

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Run through this the next time push notifications comes up.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The checklist

• Permission is granted once and revoked forever
• Notify about things people asked for, not things you want to say
• Deep link into the exact screen the notification is about
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

Why this earns attention

Permission is granted once and revoked forever. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

In practice

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. Three things worth confirming about push notifications before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Notify about things people asked for, not things you want to say — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.