Amey-Thakur Notification strategy
Every notification spends attention the user did not agree to spend. Products accumulate them one feature at a time, each defensible alone, until the whole set is muted. Strategy is deciding centrally what earns an interruption.
Method
- Classify by whether the user must act. Something needs you now, something happened you should know, and something you might find interesting are three different classes deserving different channels and urgency.
- Default to the least interruptive channel that works. In-app, then digest, then email, then push. Escalating channel is a decision requiring justification rather than the starting point.
- Ask what the user does next. A notification with no useful action is information, and information belongs in a digest or a feed (see digest-design).
- Make the sender pay a cost. A review step before any new notification type ships prevents the gradual accumulation that kills the whole channel.
- Cap total frequency per user, globally. Per-feature limits still sum to too many, so the ceiling belongs at the user level (see notification-batching).
- Write the copy at design time. If a clear one-line message cannot be written, the notification is not well defined enough to send.
- Review engagement per type and retire the dead ones. A type nobody opens is training users to ignore all of them.
Boundaries
Strategy governs what you send; delivery reliability is a separate concern (see delivery-tracking). Some notifications are legally required regardless of preference, such as security and billing notices (see transactional-messaging). Cultural and regional expectations about interruption differ and are worth respecting.