Enhancing the notification experience for customers and senders

Client: Service NSW
Role: Lead product designer

Problem

Customers were receiving inconsistent notifications and had little control over what they received.

Notification senders lacked strategy, guidelines and tools to confidently send effective notifications.

Solution

I led a redesign of the inbox and preferences to give customers more control and visibility of their important notifications.

This made it easier for customers to know when their vehicle registration was due, or when they were eligible for new benefits.

I created guidelines and templates to help senders craft more effective, consistent and meaningful notifications.

🚀 Impact

400K+
customers opt-ins for digital vehicle registration reminders

400% increase
in opt-ins and $0.5m saved annually

35% increase
in inbox usage

130K
archive events

96%
customer satisfaction

Process

Notifications can be a useful tool for customers to be informed, to engage or to take action. After remaining untouched for some time we saw an opportunity to improve how Notifications could be delivered to millions of NSW residents from the Service NSW app.

To understand more about the customer and their current issues, we completed an audit of the last 4 years of existing research and customer feedback.

We also needed to align closely with stakeholders in the notifications team and external agencies. We conducted multiple collaborative workshops to learn about their systems, needs and pain points.

For customers, we found:

we had a limited understanding of their behaviours and needs
customers couldn’t easily manage or opt-in to notifications
customers wanted control and clarity around where they would receive notifications
they wanted to receive relevant and timely notifications

For senders, we found:

a lack of an overall strategy or guidelines, leading to inconsistent experiences for customers
limited visibility of capabilities and processes
difficult and time consuming sending process

To gain a deeper understand our customers and their behaviours, feelings and perceptions on notifications, I led the development of two surveys with 100 participants.

We found:

customers preferred to be contacted by push and email, no more than once a week, as soon as possible
the most important notifications were safety, time or money sensitive
some of the most important notifications, evoked the most negative emotions

Through insights from our discovery and additional workshops, we defined 3 focus areas for ideation.

How might we empower customers to feel in control over what notifications they receive?

Customers had no way to manage their preferences in the app, so I led the design for a new native opt-in experience, and tested it with 6 participants.

Research showed that customers wanted to know what notifications they would receive, where it would be sent to, and how often. They wanted granular and high level controls.

While we were unable to provide granular channel preferences due to technical limitations, our design was optimized for ease of use and transparency of information.

To better understand how customers categorise notifications and their mental models, I developed a card sorting activity (both moderated and unmoderated) with 15 participants

We found the majority of customers grouped notifications by urgency/importance/action or by theme/topic
We gained better understand of what they do with notifications, how they triage and manage them

These insights were used to help define the opt-in notification types and a newly designed inbox.

How might we help customers feel informed, reassured and able to achieve their goals?

I led the design for a new inbox and tested this with 6 participants.

Research showed that customers wanted more control over their inbox and to easily see what was important and required action.

Our design introduced new features like starring, filtering and archiving – giving customers more control and visibility over their important notifications.

How might we give customers a consistent and seamless notification experience across multiple channels?

Senders needed guidance and information around how to send effective notifications through the app.

I developed an experience guide for notification senders. It included:

processes on how to send
notification structure and templates
categorisation of notifications
customer sentiment towards notifications
content guidance
technical capabilities

The introduction of this experience guide in conjunction with the notifications team, has helped move towards more consistent notifications, and simpler and more confident sending processes.