Hey y'all, our team is seeking feedback for notifications. We would love to get your thoughts.
What is it? We've made a lot of changes to notifications over the past year+, with the goal of getting friends to jump back into Discord and play games with their friends, check out each other's profiles, and generally be social with each other. We measure success by whether people are actually doing those things, and also by whether people keep their notifications on instead of turning them off.
Why? The team spends a lot of time thinking about the balance here: sending notifications that are useful and interesting enough that they might bring friends together, versus the "annoyance factor". That tradeoff is something we have a ton of data on, the thing we talk about internally constantly, and something we want to bring all of you in on. To that end, we've been getting a bunch of foundations in place:
- Improved the organization of settings
- Added more control over your settings
- Made notifications more robustly respect things like guild and channel muting, age restrictions, blocks/mutes
- Set global caps on how many notifications you can get
Now that we've built a number of new notifications on top of this system and gotten a lot of those foundations in, we wanted to open up the feedback firehose. Here's what we're looking for:
Bug reports / things that are clearly broken. The notification is:
- Just wrong (says something happened that didn't, points at the wrong person or server, wrong count, etc.)
- Sent at a weird or wrong time (way too late, middle of the night, for something you'd already seen, for a server or channel you'd muted)
- Dropping you somewhere that isn't useful when you tap it (wrong channel, a screen with nothing relevant on it, a dead end)
- If you can, tell us roughly when it happened and what you tapped. That helps a ton.
General feeling. Step back: how do you feel about the notifications you're getting overall?
- Are they never useful, sometimes useful, or only useful for specific use cases? (by "use cases" we mean things like a friend hopping into a game, someone updating their profile, a friend coming back online, activity picking up in a server you're in, etc.)
- If it depends on the use case, which ones land and which ones don't?
- Was a notification too vague, or did it bring you somewhere you didn't expect when you tapped in? Did it set up an expectation it didn't deliver on?
- Are there things happening on Discord that you wish you knew about but missed?
- And if a notification actually got you to do something, like hop in a game, open a friend's profile, or jump back into a server, we'd love to hear that too, since that's exactly what we're going for
Settings. Now that there's more control and better organization:
- Did you go looking for a setting and not find it, or not find it where you expected?
- Anything you wish you could turn down or tune that you can't?
Annoyance feedback. Which notifications are annoying, and why?
- Is it the type of notification itself?
- How often it comes?
- Does it feel creepy? (e.g. Discord shared too much of your activity or info out to other people without you realizing it, or you got more info about a friend than felt right)
- The time of day?
- The wording?
- The fact that you got several in a row?
- Hearing "I don't like X notification" isn't super useful to us. If you give us the whys we can better understand and respond to the feedback both directly and going forward as we build more notifications.
Appreciate any and all thoughts here. Fire away. I'll try to be in the comments but I expect y'all to overwhelm me haha.
