Empowering users with a respectful notification management system to get work done and effectively collaborate.

Timeline: Summer Internship Team: Workspaces(Awareness Area) Role: Product Design Intern

Context.

When people are collaborating in Dropbox on shared work, they struggle to control the notifications that they receive because the controls to do so are scattered across different places (web, desktop, mobile). My project was to focus on providing better ways for users to control their notification preferences directly.

H y p o t h e s i s

If we create a clear way to control notifications for users, they will take more collaborative actions to the work that matters, thus retain at higher rates.

Design Mind:

Make it simple for users to configure the volume and cadence of notification types, so that they will know why they received it and what action they would take.

Product Mind:

Notifications should be a valuable entry to users’ state of workflow that will increase users' collaborative actions.

User Need:

Get the work done and not be distracted by annoying and irrelevant notifications.

Engineering Perspective:

Relevant notifications can be amplified by solving context tone-deafness (inappropriate channel/timing) and cascading issues (notifications sent to all channels at once).

Research.

I started off by investigating user flows, information architecture, and mental modals of other competitive products. Such analysis has informed our trade-off matrix to evaluate each notification models.

In addition, I read research studies conducted by design researchers, captured their recommendations, and talked to some of them to ask some questions. Affinity diagrams are split into mobile and desktop research studies. I also explored multiple user flows for some types of users to identify locations of intent for notifications to come in as relevant entry points.