Notifications best practices

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 adoption.

Notification features Use for
Dashboard notification area 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 an individual user's attention to, for example to update an asset , share an update or ask a question.
Out of the box notifications
  • Users can subscribe to email notifications on specific system events, 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 overused or misused. The recommendations below will help you optimize their usage.

Best Practice Recommendations

  • Balance the benefits of notifications with the need to not overwhelm users with too many notifications.
    • Consider bundling notifications with rules, such as scheduling them weekly or monthly, to reduce the total number of individual notifications. For example, rather than send an email every time an event happens, you can send them at intervals to bundle several messages into a single email.
    • Evaluate which notifications should go to which user types or roles.
    • Evaluate which notification method is best for each situation above.
  • Dashboard notifications should be short and headline-oriented with links to current information.This ensures that the notification area does not become crowded, and users can focus on current, urgent items.
  • Leverage email templates and include your organization's branding to make them appear more relevant.
  • Limit the frequency of workflow emails so as not to exhaust users attention.
  • Promote the use of @user mentions across your user communities. This feature is powerful and easy to use, 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 the use of the various notification options to improve users experience and avoid inundating them with too many notifications.

Additional Information

For more information, go to the following resources: