What's the difference between 'Watch' and 'Follow' and when should one be preferred over the other?

Question

I am working on a website whose primary audience is developers and system administrators(fairly technical folks). The website lets users download modules per their technical infrastructure's needs. We are introducing a feature where users can receive notification alerts for the modules they are interested in. Our team has conflicting thoughts on how should this feature be presented to the users:

1. Follow: More popular and globally understood as something users use to show interest (mostly profiles in the social media world). However, in social media users usually have a feed that is curated based on what they follow. But here it is just about receiving notifications. Users don't have a personalized feed they can curate.
2. Watch: Used in tools like Jira to show interest and receive updates over a particular ticket. However, can be misunderstood in terms of visits/views as to how many people visited a particular module.

Answer 1

Welcome to the site!

As you seem to know your users, ask them. An unmoderated survey should be good for this simple question. You can add the survey trigger to your website or send it out via email.

I see two different approaches:

• Ask what the users expect to happen on either Watch or Follow (ask half of them about Watch first, the other half about Follow first) - you'll get harder-to-analyze descriptions, which may tell you the yet another term (see comment) is better.

• Explain what the function shall do, and ask them whether they would call this Watch or Follow. For openness, you can add an Other option where they can add their own favorite term.