July 2021 Summaries

Notifications can guide users through key setup steps in onboarding, reward positive interactions, and encourage exploration. However, poorly designed notifications can be frustrating and lead to user abandonment. A well-designed notification strategy should extend the core product UX, consider user personas, goals, thoughts, feelings, potential pain points, channel usage, and areas of confusion. By creating a journey map, teams can identify blindspots in the user experience and implement targeted notifications that improve engagement and retention rates, such as 30% better retention for mobile apps with in-app messaging and 97% higher response rate compared to emails.

A startup founder successfully used a sophisticated notification strategy to increase timely engagement with their community on Product Hunt, ultimately ranking #5 on launch day and being featured in the newsletter. To achieve this, they identified their target audience, created focused email lists, and scheduled social media posts leading up to the event. They also utilized LinkedIn's Air Traffic Controller feature to funnel connections into an event, and used tools like Google Calendar and Clicktotweet to mass distribute notifications to employees and followers. By sending targeted communication at the right time, they generated significant traffic to their Product Hunt page, including 280 upvotes and 70 positive comments.

When considering the choice between GraphQL and REST, it's essential to evaluate your specific constraints and needs. GraphQL is ideal for applications that require granular control over data retrieval, such as when dealing with complex or interconnected data. It provides a self-documenting schema and type-safe queries, allowing developers to specify exactly what information they need. However, GraphQL also comes with its own set of challenges, including a steep learning curve, control inversion, and potential naming collisions. REST, on the other hand, is a familiar option that can be implemented quickly, with many ORMs optimized for it. It's well-suited for quick transactional requests and shares complexity between client and server. Ultimately, the choice between GraphQL and REST depends on your specific use case and needs, requiring careful consideration of trade-offs and potential challenges.

Building a notification system for an MVP can drive engagement, enable user journeys based on asynchronous actions, and support time-sensitive operations. A simple notification system consists of key components such as notification triggers, decision logic, templating, and connections to messaging providers. By implementing these components, developers can send notifications via email APIs, create message templates using a templating "system", and make decisions on whether to notify users based on event parameters. When building an MVP-stage notification system, it's essential to consider features that drive metrics such as daily active users, exclude non-essential functionality, and prioritize polished experiences for a limited set of notifications, right timing, and reliability. Additionally, developers should avoid common pitfalls such as shortcuts that can become painful in the future, neglecting deliverability, and not considering multiple customer groups' experiences. By following these guidelines, developers can build an MVP notification system quickly and effectively.