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I have an app that the user sends texts to experts, and after 5 minutes he get back a response.

I want to show a notification to the user when he got a response.

The question: When & How do you recommend to ask the user if he want notifications?

APP: https://englishreview.net

Screenshot: enter image description here

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You see by taking the screenshot you already started creating the part of the story you want to express to your users

So in the context of englishreview.net you want to send a notification to the user when there is a reply from the professional/expert reader.

The When

Since, and correct me if I am wrong, you cannot force enable notifications the first time you are going to show a notification it has to go through the user's explicit choice.

And the busy user will not wait for someone to respond. He will have clicked to another tab. The good thing is that he is still getting notifications for his email inbox.
Therefore I would suggest to ping the user for the notification if he is still online and if he doesn't respond in a reasonable amount of time then send him an email which its sole purpose will be the notifications. Not how they work in general! but how they work in for your app.

The How

The important thing is to explain:

  • How notifications are useful and important for your user
  • Tell the users what they need to do to enable notifications (they might not have interacted with desktop notifications before)
  • Show a sample notification to the user to know what to expect
  • Give them options. Perhaps more than two in case you have a fallback if he does not accept desktop notifications

This is something to get you started but knowing your users better you might come up with more suitable layouts.

idea layout

Btw trying to find a way to experience a notification on demand I stumbled upon this app: https://pushcrew.com [no advertisement intended] You might find it complementary to your current implementation ;)

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  • Thank you very much. You gave me some good ideas. 1. The first ask the user first if he wants notification. 2. You right I cannot force notification without is approving. 3. If he respond to the notification I don't need to send email. Thanks!
    – Aminadav Glickshtein
    May 27, 2016 at 9:51
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The natural time to ask that seems to be when they get notifications:

You just got an expert response.

[ ] Don't show these notifications.

Keep it in subsequent notifications too, so they can turn off the notifications after they get a few of them and get sick of them.

This option probably belongs in their user account as well.

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    This is how I would handle it as well. I might even expand the alert to say "[ ] Don't show these notifications. You can re-enable these notifications in Account Settings." or wherever.
    – maxathousand
    May 26, 2016 at 20:24
  • That sounds good. We see that kind of thing pretty frequently.
    – Ken Mohnkern
    May 26, 2016 at 20:52
  • The problem is that I need to request permission for send notification, before the first notification.
    – Aminadav Glickshtein
    May 28, 2016 at 18:15
  • You'll need permission to send anything to the user's email, but popping a notification in the UI shouldn't require any permissions.
    – Ken Mohnkern
    May 28, 2016 at 21:36

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