What to ask your agency about push notifications

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on push notifications, these questions are worth asking early.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Permission is granted once and revoked forever. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Deep link into the exact screen the notification is about. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

In practice

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.