What is the best way to map a product's system of notifications?

Question

I am looking for some design research or other method which is used to map notification's frequency, priority, and intensity based upon a user's emotion, behavior, etc.

This method could be applied to any user task in which we would like the user to complete. How might we map the system of email marketing, push notifications, SMS, product notifications (fullscreen modal, toast, etc.) and other notification methods in a meaningful way which does not overwhelm the user, but still keeps them on track for completing the task.

Is there any method which exists to map user behavior and how the frequency/schedule of notifications directly impacts that?

I guess a user journey map could work here, but I was looking for something that attunes directly to notifications in digital products. I feel as if there's intrinsic design opportunity to balancing frequency/intensity of notifications and a user's behavior/emotions.

Answer 1

There is actually a helpful article from the Smashing Magazine about Including Animation in Your Design System, which goes into some details about why this would be useful when you are trying to create a consistent and meaningful user experience.

The reason why this should be done at a high level in the design system, and then for the core principles to trickle down to the specific components, is to ensure that there is consistency in the timing, persistence and other temporal/time related experiences for the users.

However, you have also included types of notifications and messaging to the user that occurs outside of the application (e.g. email or SMS), which can be hard to define or map because of the variable nature that the user will respond to them (e.g. based on their notification preferences or how often they normally check other channels).

I think you will need a combination of high level design system/development framework guidelines, implementation details and then in-depth component use cases and variations if you want to be able to capture all of this information. It is probably a bit too difficult to try and reverse engineer this information and compile into a map.