A short guide to push notifications

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Everything we would tell a client about push notifications in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What is actually at stake

Permission is granted once and revoked forever. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

How we handle it

Notify about things people asked for, not things you want to say. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The mistakes we see most

Deep link into the exact screen the notification is about. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

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
• Deep link into the exact screen the notification is about — 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.