Let’s make mobile push notifications smarter
It seems that every app has push notifications these days. New apps are adding them. Older apps are doing more of them.
When Justin Bieber was arrested, even the iHeartRadio app sent a breaking news alert. CNN’s app sent three of them. When Nelson Mandela died, Twitter’s app sent a push, and ESPN Sportscenter’s app sent several of its own. All these news alerts join a growing chorus of push notifications from games, utilities and just about every other app out there.
Some are valuable. A growing number are spam.
It’s easy to explain why push notifications are all the rage: they’re incredibly effective at driving mobile engagement.
“It’s hard to over-hype the power of mobile push notifications,” explains entrepreneur Ariel Seidman in a blog post. “For the first time in human history you can tap almost two billion people on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey! Pay attention to this!’”
But when you’re getting tapped on your shoulder for something you don’t want, you become annoyed. Even outraged. A quick search on Twitter illustrates a growing push-back against push notifications.
“Push notifications are somebody knocking at your door saying, ‘Look at this!” Seidman says, which helps explain why users react more emotionally than receiving an unwanted email. Even useful push alerts become annoying at high volume, and the frequency is escalating.
We’ve been experimenting with push notifications for several years at Breaking News, monitoring how people respond across a wide variety of stories. We’ve learned that the best solution is to empower people to get the push notifications they want, reserving universal push notifications for truly big stories. That’s why we created custom push alerts for any topic, warning people in advance how many alerts they can expect.
When the Bieber story broke, we were tempted to push the button to blast it out to everyone. After all, it would drive phenomenal engagement. But we couldn’t imagine tapping people on their shoulders to tell them that Justin Bieber had been arrested. Only a small segment of our audience wants to get pinged with Bieber news, and they can easily set their own Bieber alerts in the Breaking News app.
That’s just one way to make notifications more meaningful. What if we can anticipate what users want before they explicitly say they want it? Can we anticipate who wants a Bieber alert? And when they want it? As notifications get smarter, users will pay more attention to them.
In the meantime, a backlash is brewing. If the barrage continues, users will instinctively opt out of push notifications before they have a chance to see if they’re useful. And that will be bad for everyone.
(Breaking News is a standalone startup owned by NBC News Digital.)