Buyer communication preferences
Giving users more control of how and when they receive information from Gumtree through notifications
The team
1 Designer (me)
1 Product Manager
4 Engineers
1 Tech lead
1 UX researcher
1 content copywriter
The scope
User research, interaction design, visual design.
I led the UI and UX design for the Buyer team, working closely with the product manager and tech lead. This consisted of planning the discussion guide for the user interviews and UI changes on the app and website. The user interviews were conducted by an external agency, Pollen.
The timeframe
April - June 2022
The problem
There was a bug that resulted in Gumtree not sending notifications based on what the user selected. Instead, sometimes they would receive notifications even if they opted out, and other times they would not receive some notifications that they opted in to. We also had other insights from when users reported bugs.
Our team’s goal was to:
Fix the bug
Reduce the number of people opting out of push notifications on iOS and Android and on web.
I also wanted to find and address any other design opportunities that would improve the buyers experience.
Previous design:
Alignment
To align the team and have an open discussion about scope, I ran an ideation session. This included The Buyer Team and stakeholders from the marketing team.
The main prompt was “How might we give users more control over what notifications they receive?”
Main ideas revolved around the themes:
Frequency: Can we give users control over frequency. eg. immediate, daily, weekly notifications?
Clarity: Can we make it clearer what each notification refers to?
Contextual: Can we send notifications only when relevant?
Email vs push notifications: Can they control this from any device (web or app)
Personalisation/segmentation: Can we send comms based on the users behaviour and interests?
User testing
I designed a few iterations and took two prototypes to user testing.
Main insights:
People were turning off notifications completely because they couldn’t control them
Unclear which toggle referred to which notification and how to control email vs push notifications
It was clearer to show whether the toggle was on or off, in one long screen, rather than show one screen
Design solution
iOS notification preferences
Long screen easier to read and cleaned up the copy
Android notification preferences
Email notifications
Worked with a copywriter to get rid of confusion, such as copy communicating that this page on the website was for emails only.
How might we prompt users to turn on notifications?
After launching the revamped notification centre, we needed a way to prompt users to turn on notifications
Pre-permission upon login
These iOS notification modals only show once, upon downloading the app. Once the user taps “Don’t allow”, it can’t be showed anymore.
Instead of only showing the default iOS modal straight away, the new design allowed us to only show it if users tapped “Turn on notifications”.
Prompting after sending a message to a seller
User testing participants said that they would be inclined to to turn this notification on and that it did not feel spammy.
Impact
Three months after launching, there was:
An increase on Android push opt-ins by 18%
An increase on iOS push opt-ins by 4%
We also removed the 100% rule (some users were completely opted out of email notifications if they opted out of a few email notifications), which increased emails sent by 25%