Redirect user after login depending on the context

Question

In the website we're building after users log in we redirect them to their "Organization" page. We have a new feature that allows two users to connect. Many users seem to ignore incoming connection requests, probably because they can't see them or they don't know exactly what they are.

My colleague came up with this idea: if there's a pending connection request the users get redirected to the "Connections" page, if there are not pending connection requests users get redirected to the "Organization" page like before.

It seems to me that this can confuse our users since they see different pages when they log in and they might not know why.

Is it acceptable to do such a thing? What are better approaches?

Answer 1

I agree that directing to different pages based on the state is confusing. Also, it will be annoying if the user just wants to perform some other task and is interrupted by the connection request.

It would be better just to highlight the connection requests more. You could, for example, put a prominent notification near the top of the site, which persists until the user either goes to the connections page or clicks to close the notification.