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Messenger · 2023 · Lead Content Designer

Fixing notifications on Messenger

  • A two-month war-room effort to undo the damage of growth-first notifications.
  • Community Chats had become so noisy that users were turning off notifications for all of Messenger.
  • We rebuilt the system quality-first.
  • Users ended up with fewer notifications than before, and better ones.
Settings & controls User education Content strategy
Fixing notifications on Messenger

The problem

Community Chats launched in growth mode, and notifications were the favorite lever; so notifications were liberal and generous. However we soon learned that users were turning off notifications for the entire Messenger app if their communities became too loud, and missing important messages from their friends.

The brief

Fix it.

What I did

I owned the language and settings experience end to end: the settings themselves, the upsell language, and the content updates that shipped to Android. Engineering owned the batching fixes. Together, we took a quality-first approach:

Fixed the foundations

Repaired broken notification systems on Android, so the experience matched what we designed.

Granular settings

Built controls that let people control Community notifications without silencing the whole app.

Education beyond the surface

Taught users about their options outside the Communities surface itself, meeting them where the frustration lived.

Conservative batching

Grouped notifications deliberately.

Sample 1

Notification value upsell

Reminding users of their current notification settings and informing them of a new update.

Messenger chat list with a notifications-off upsell banner encouraging users to turn on chat notifications Messenger chat list with an upsell banner announcing new settings to turn notifications on just for chats with friends

Sample 2

New notification settings

We built out community-specific notification settings so that users didn’t need to silence the entire app.

Notifications and sounds settings screen with granular toggles for Communities and channels

And then what happened?

  • The war room hit its goal in about two months and the ecosystem recovered.
  • Users received fewer notifications than before, but higher-quality ones, and they stopped abandoning notifications app-wide.

What I learned

It took reviewing the longer-term data to see that respecting attention is vital for sustainable growth. So the fix had to take a long-term mindset as well, through transparent settings, smarter batching and better, fewer notifications.