Or, how we’re destroying users’ trust, and how to get it back. Check out the first post in this series as well: Building a Great UX Outside of Your App. There is a direct connection between all the unnecessary notifications you get on your phone and the sub-prime financial crisis of 2008. The connection is human behavior in a large and anonymous marketplace where bad behavior is rarely punished.
Recently I had a chance to talk to DevOps Minneapolis about the true nature of user experience. The audience found this information to be particularly interesting, so I thought it would be helpful to share it with a wider audience. This post will be the first in a series of three posts that will discuss user experience beyond your app’s UI and how you can optimize it. So where is your user experience? More generally, where does your application happen?
Follow along with the video tutorial: We are launching our first hackathon next week, and giving away over $1K in prizes! Join us in building a cool project and winning any of the following prizes 🏆 Additionally, everyone who submits a project successfully integrating the Courier API will receive a $20 Amazon gift card! Not sure where to start? In this tutorial, we will be building a Node.js app that sends multi-channel notifications in morse code.
The daily bombardment of alerts dinging, beeping, and ringing from all those applications we use is enough to drive someone completely crazy. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, we allow ourselves to be interrupted by Slack in a way we wouldn’t from any other platform. Even though it seems completely counterintuitive, and despite the sheer amount of daily notifications (because we still can get a bunch of notifications from Slack alone), we love and use Slack—a lot.
For many organizations, Slack is the software of choice for business communication. Slack’s ubiquity in modern companies makes it one of the first notification integrations a SaaS company might want to build, possibly after email and mobile push notifications. In our experience, Slack notifications are a great way to reach business users (as Slack is mostly used in a business context) with time-sensitive alerts or action items while they’re at work.
Product notifications are a mission-critical component of your product that can’t be left to chance. However, notification channels are ever-evolving, and you need to keep up in order to reach users when, where, and how they prefer to be reached. A future-proof multichannel notifications strategy helps you stay in touch with your users without coming off as intrusive, non-responsive, or antiquated.
If you’ve worked on a digital product, whether as a developer, product manager, or business leader, you know that the most common problems in software development are rarely as straightforward as “bugs.” The root of the problem tends to require a little more trial and error. Using Courier is no different.
When thinking about handling PII (Personally Identifiable Information) for SaaS companies, standards like SOC 2 compliance and GDPR immediately come to mind. One of the most sensitive types of information for a tech company to handle, however, is actually PHI, or protected health information. To be able to handle this type of data, a company must become HIPAA compliant.
Setting up your own servers requires a lot of up-front investment and ongoing maintenance. That’s why most technology companies today use an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider for their compute needs.
Here at Courier, we recently announced a new focus on mobile notifications, which is the next big step to meeting our goals for our product. The biggest reason to focus on mobile is because it will drastically improve the user experience for anyone using mobile apps - which at this point, is everyone. This post explores the importance of building better quality mobile notifications and how to go about creating them.
