Good resources on technical boundaries of (push) notifications

Question

Our retail company uses a mobile browser-based tool to manage and fulfil orders. Basically, people working in our stores check a list of orders that need to be prepared, assign one or more to themselves and then follow all the steps until that task is finished.

We will soon implement push notifications on that tool to let the users know that a new order/task is on the list. Basically, all the users that work at the store will receive the same notification about a new order that needs to be prepped for shipping in the next 15 minutes.

Interacting with the notification must then take the user to the page inside the tool in which he/she will see the details of that order, and where he/she will assign that prepping task to him/herself.

When that happens, ideally, the notification would be cleared to the other users, or maybe replaced by another saying something like "John Doe started the prepping on the order nº 12345" (only one person can work the order at the same time).

Our team has been tasked with the design of these notifications, but since this is something new to us, we don't really know the full range of interactions that are available.

The ideas we currently have come from popular apps, like spotify (which I assume is a notification), for example, that shows the album cover, changes the background color to match it and has playback controls and a "like" button.

So, if anyone could shed some light - with resources, references or personal experience - on this subject, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

As of 2021:

"All the users that work at the store will receive the same notification about a new order that needs to be prepped for shipping in the next 15 minutes" - Yes, this is possible.

"Interacting with the notification must then take the user to the page inside the tool in which he/she will see the details of that order..." This is possible, too.

"When that happens, ideally, the notification would be cleared to the other users..." It's complicated. There's some info on StackOverflow that makes it seem possible to expire notifications, but they're based on time rather than other users' activity. You could theoretically set a notification to expire quickly after an order is assigned.

"maybe replaced by another saying something like 'John Doe started the prepping on the order nº 12345'" You can send an updated notification with this info but it's not likely it can replace an earlier message.

Let's talk about the UX side of this.

It seems like, on a busy day, your users are going to get a lot of push notifications in this scenario, and there's only so much screen space for them.

If 8 users receive a "new order" notification and only one user can start working on it, what do the other 7 see when they attempt to view the order? Will they keep seeing the same "This order is already in progress, please ignore" message when they click inside the app? If the notification can disappear a minute after someone starts working on the order, this might create a disincentive for action -- users might want to wait to see if the notification will go away, and only act on it if it's getting close to the 15-minute mark.

If your goal is to have as many users concurrently working as many orders as possible:

• Let the system assign orders to specific users; otherwise, you risk having nobody take an order to work on. Perhaps a notification is sent with "Accept / Decline" actions so if a user is indisposed or in the middle of talking to a customer, they can tap Decline and it goes on to the next available user.

• It might also be good to have these on a timer so that the system can move on to another user in the case of no response; you'd want to communicate a "respond by" expiration time in the message.

• Let orders be assigned based on how close they are to the deadline. A stale or overdue order always gets prioritized over a new one.