#14 - Stop asking for notification permissions too early

The very first thing I received when I opened the My Perfect Hotel game published by SayGames is a request to enable notification permissions. And my first interaction with the app was to decline it.?

My Perfect Hotel is hardly unique here. A surprising amount of apps, especially games, are guilty of asking for permissions, without giving any justification for them, too early in the user journey.

There's 3 key reasons you shouldn't be asking this before users have gotten into the app: motivation, opportunity loss, and analytics.

Why not to ask:

Users lack motivation

Motivation to enable push notifications is extremely low before I’ve even opened the app. It’s axiomatic in behavior design that people are less likely to do something if they lack sufficient motivation. In fact, most users are often motivated NOT to enable notifications.?

Notification fatigue is a phenomenon whereby users don’t respond to notifications as much because they get too many of them. Either users will not grant permissions so they can minimize the contributors to their fatigue, or the notifications won’t be effective at the behavior they're trying to drive.

In fact, "78% of millennials in particular reported deleting an app because it was bothering them." So make sure you're using the notifications wisely.

You can't ask again later

Once the user has declined, you can't ask again at all on iOS. On Google, you get a single second chance. Per the Android Developer Guide on permissions:

If a user denies a permission request more than once, this is considered a permanent denial. It's very important to only prompt users for permissions when they need access to a specific feature, otherwise you might inadvertently lose the ability to re-request permissions.

So you've now blown your shot. You can't take advantage of a heighted moment of motivation, you can't pitch it when you add a new feature. You'd have to send users to their phone settings to find the permission and turn it back on.

With only one, or possibly two shots to show the prompt for the permission, focus on making sure you get it right and leave the door open to make improvements.

Potential data loss to analyze and iterate

You can't analyze any data if your analytics package hasn't even been fully initialized which is a possibility this early in the user journey. This means you don't know yet if the user has given permissions and you can't measure the impact of asking for permissions on your onboarding flow.

If your using a martech platform with push messaging capabilities such as CleverTap , Leanplum by CleverTap , Braze , or OneSignal , the platform usually will provide you information about if a user has notifications enabled or not. And if that's not synced with your analytical tools, you could have another place you risk missing the data. If you're sending push notifications from your own backend or using local notifications, you wouldn't have that data at all.

Notifications are how your app can communicate with the users while the app is closed. They deliver information and remind users to engage with the app and the brand. Setting them up is part of a user's onboarding experience and it's vital to be able to test, analyze, and iterate on the user experience.

Some tips to get it right

Give the user agency

For general app usage reminders, consider allowing users to select their preferred time. This increases the odds that the notifications will be effective (as users will now receive prompts when they are actionable) and increases the likelihood that users will be motivated to follow through. The user recognizes the notification as something they've opted into and had some control over so it increases the overall sense of autonomy and therefore intrinsic motivation.

On a recent project for a healthcare app, I added language asking not only when and what days users would want to be reminded to use the app, I also explained to the user that they would need about 5 minutes of free time to accomplish what they needed to in the app. This would help the user consider the time they wanted to use the app.

Ask on feature use

A recommended approach is to ask for permission when the user engages with a feature that works with notifications. "Would you like us to remind you to collect your daily bonus with a notification?"

This approach of waiting for a user to interact with is recommended by Google and iOS as a best practice. As Apple's developer documentation puts it:

Make the request in a context that helps people understand why your app needs authorization. In a task-tracking app that sends reminder notifications, you might make the request after the person schedules a first task. Sending the request in context provides a better experience than automatically requesting authorization on first launch, because people can see the purpose your apps notifications serve.

Tell users why they would want the notifications

You can increase the motivation to allow notifications by justifying it and tying it to the overall value proposition of the app. Some examples:

• Users who use notifications are 83% times more likely to achieve their learning goals. (edtech)
• Let us remind you to add your symptoms each day with notifications. What's a good time for that? (healthcare)
• We use push notifications to help you keep track of all your card transactions which helps improve your financial literacy and understanding of your spending. (banking)
• We can alert you so you never miss a message from a suitor. (dating app)

This also opens the door to experiment with the timing and verbiage on the requests allowing you to optimize the valuable retention and engagement feature of notifications.

Use separate notification channels

Separate your notifications into categories based on what a user wants. The least amount of notifications the user will tolerate and engage with is ideal. By allowing the user to specify which notifications they care about you again improve a user's autonomy AND reduce the likelihood of them turning off ALL notifications leaving you unable to reach them.

Don't just give the options though, make sure users understand that they HAVE these options. Better to deny some than to deny all. (This happened to me recently, being annoyed by Etsy notifications, but I thought to check if they had channel settings).

This is particularly important if you have functional notifications related to the app's overall use vs marketing/promotional notifications which Apple's usability guidelines firmly state should have their own permission and considerations.

Conclusion

Notifications are not a feature to shrug off. Even simply asking for permission to provide them should be thoughtful. Make sure you've got the permissions and the notifications themselves set up for testing and iteration. A poor implementation can lead to users not allowing them and, if allowed, can lead to users deleting the app entirely.

Heather Arbiter is a Product Manager, Game/Gamification Designer, and practitioner of behavior design. She has over 4 years of hands-on experience implementing, working with, and improving notifications systems in games, fintech, and healthcare.