14th
Product etiquette: when app developers fail users
I find myself often thinking about emerging internet etiquette (or ‘netiquette’, as coined by Andrew Parker in a recent post). While Andrew focuses on usage etiquette, I’m particularly interested with product etiquette. By ‘product etiquette’ I mean the way in which the product engages with the user.
There are two principle product engagement issues that I care about:
- privacy settings
- notifications
The key considerations are 1) what are the default settings, and 2) how easy is it to change my settings.
Default settings are tremendously important since most users are incapable (either out of technical fear or technical ignorance) of adjusting away from the defaults. But for those of us that can manually adapt the settings to our preferences, it is up to the app developer to give us easy access to the right setting toggles.
Recently, I’ve been using a number of new ‘social apps’ on my phone. Without fail, every one of these apps has some default notification setting that is, to my taste, overly aggressive. The sheer volume of notifications telling me that someone in my contact book has started using the app or has check-in somewhere has made these notifications go from useful to useless.
Don’t get me wrong, I get why apps set the defaults the way they do - they hope to drive user engagement, create network effects, and smooth the on boarding processes so users immediately discover value of the app.
But in practice, these default choices bear substantial cost. I now find the signal to noise ratio of notifications to be pathetically poor. I am scared to open up many apps knowing that I will be bombarded by marginally useful ‘buzzes’. Compounding the issue, the setting toggles for many apps are really difficult to figure out (though in fairness, the toggles for some apps are straight forward and easy to understand/modify).
I might be in the minority here, but as a user my preference is to see product etiquette evolve away from aggressive notification defaults. I just hope that what developers give up in in-your-face virality they more than make up for in positive user experience.
