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We provide a platform where our customers run their business on our systems.

We have several types of notifications we want to show to users:

  1. App feature update notifications
  2. Messages from administrators to their users
  3. "Actionable" notifications a la "Don't forget to XYZ"

There are some UX issues we are trying to work out:

  1. Some of our users almost never user the app. So if they have 50 messages waiting for them when they do log in and load the app, it could be annoying to show them all those notifications (depending on how we display it)
  2. Some power users are always logged in and keep the app open and are working in it frequently. So just showing the latest notifications when someone logs in would miss these users since they are almost always already logged in
  3. Many users are members of multiple organizations in our app and could get notifications from our platform and multiple of their organizations. It could be a lot, but they are all fairly important.

How should we show these notifications? Some ideas are to show a dialog on login that shows the most recent 5 notifications (pageable). We've also thought about having a list on the dashboard of notifications that can be scrolled.

When should we show these notifications? On login? On page load, check for new notifications and show it to them? In a dialog?

Any best practices for this? Patterns?

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  • Why not allow user preferences for notifications of different importance/urgency? A good design system for messaging and notification would categorize and allow users to manage them in a way that suits their use cases. Commented May 6, 2024 at 22:48

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Best practices

Suggestions are somewhat vague here bc I know nothing about the real application.

Consider all messages you send to the users as "nice to have" but "not necessary to survive". Even if you think they are important, they are not automatically. They are only important to users who chose them to be worth reading anyway.

Consider the idea to use a dialog or popup upon login as being the absolute worst case. You would confront the user with those "spam" messages (from their point of view) and force to deal with them, even if the user just wanted to do something different.

Golden rule: Don't disturb the user in their intentions to use the provided service. Offer but do not force.

Upon login you can show an icon with a number indicating unread messages for example. But you need to allow the user to decide when it is the right time to read them. Meaning: Provide the function to access the messages but do not force the user when to use it.

The idea to have them displayed as the latest 5 messages on the desktop/dashboard is a good approach if you think you need to promote the messages to be read more likely. You can even show the next messages if a user reads or dismisses one of them in the group of five - but keep the maximum of 5 messages or message headers displayed at one time.

The power users are maybe covered as well already: If you can show a "new message" icon with a number or just a new message showing up in the dashboard area, they will notice it and can check their "inbox" to mark everything as read if they want to keep things clean. This needs a "channel" from the backend to the client app of course, to inform them in near real time if new messages arrive. Or some polling-on-demand strategy (for example upon each refresh or entering the inbox).

Messages from administrators could be special and really important if they for example announce service downtimes. In this case you should consider a banner message in the app or a special area on the dashboard. If these messages are deemed critical there should be an option to get those by Email as well if a user does not check the app regularly.

For the multi-subscription users you probably need to have a fine grained option to decide which messages to receive inside the app or by email etc. - maybe filtered by certain keywords (e.g. send messages containing "downtime" per email to "xyz@...").

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