Notifications best practices (NEW)

Recommendation

Collibra offers several powerful packaged features for enhancing user adoption via notifications, as shown in the table below. Leverage them to enhance your users’ experience and enhance adoption.

Notification features Use for
Notification area of dashboards

Changes that can impact the user experience, such as:

  • changes in the metamodel design
  • onboarding new communities, new use cases, data sources, or processes
  • delays or issues with data quality, availability, and so on.
Workflow emails
  • Progress of workflow processes
  • Collect information from users
  • Share information with users
Banners
  • Scheduled maintenance
  • Critical or urgent updates to user environment
@mentions
  • Highlight a specific item that you want to draw individual users’ attention to (for example, asset updates, sharing an update, asking a question
Out of the box notifications
  • Users can subscribe to notifications on specific system events to be notified by email when they occur, such as maintenance or content updates

Impact

While notifications can be extremely useful in crafting the overall user experience, they can also detract from the experience if over-used or mis-used. The recommendations below will help you optimize their usage for best effect.

Best Practice Recommendations

  • Balance the benefits of notifications with the need not to overwhelm users with too many notifications, which may lead to ignoring them.

    • Consider bundling notifications with rules, such as weekly or monthly to reduce the total number of individual notifications. For example, rather than send an email every time an event happens, by sending them at intervals you can bundle several messages into a single email.
    • Evaluate which notifications should go to which user types (roles)

    • Evaluate which notification method is best for each situation above

  • Dashboard notifications should be short and headline-oriented with links to more, current information. Avoid clogging the notification area with over-long notifications. Curate the notification area so that it contains only fresh news to avoid users ignoring stale information. Content should generally focus on current urgent items and upcoming changes.

  • Leverage email templates and include your organization branding to make them appear more relevant (and likely to be read)

  • Limit the frequency of workflow emails so as not to exhaust users attention (but not too infrequently either – strive for an optimum balance)

  • Promote the use of @user mentions across your user communities. The feature is easy and powerful but often overlooked.

  • Configure and promote the use of the out-of-the-box notifications. Users should be encouraged to leverage the subscription preferences to optimize their experience.

Validation Criteria

Capture user feedback to ensure you’re optimizing your use of the various notification options to improve users experience and avoid inundating them with too many notifications.

Additional Information

For more information see the following resources: