UX: Engaging people with notification emails without overwhelming them with noise

Updated March 9th- next iteration ready for feedback: https://goo.gl/7mjyQv

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Original context, November 25th

Notification emails are critical for engaging people: 40% of all traffic to loomio.org comes from emails generated by activity in app.

At the same time, we know that sending too many emails is irritating, and causes people to disengage.

We’ve put a lot of energy into navigating this balance, and we’ve got a really powerful system, once you understand how to use it. The problem is, it takes a huge effort to figure out how it works!

When it comes to email, people’s preferences and needs are really different.

If the default settings are ‘too quiet’, Loomio feels like an empty room: you raise an idea and nobody responds. If the default settings are ‘too loud’, it feels really intimidating to speak up, because you know that your idea is going to be broadcast to every single person in your group.

Either way, the consequence is that people are discouraged from contributing :(

The challenge

The defaults need to work well for people that are not likely to get in and change their settings.

Once you decide to alter your settings, they need to be intuitive and easy to configure.

## How Loomio’s email settings currently work

Right now, when you first join a Loomio group, you’ll get a bunch of emails:

• Whenever someone starts a thread you will be notified immediately.
• If you participate in the thread, or if someone @mentions you, you will be emailed notifications of subsequent activity in that thread.
• You will be emailed when someone starts a proposal, when it is about to close, and when a proposal outcome is published.
• You will be emailed if someone @mentions you in a comment, or if their comment is posted in reply to yours.
• You will receive the ‘Yesterday on Loomio’ summary email each morning, which contains all of yesterday’s activity that you haven’t read yet.

The great thing is you can reply directly to any of these emails (excluding the summary email), and your comment will be added to the thread.

Changing these settings is kinda painful

If you want to change any of that behaviour, there’s quite a lot to learn.

First, you can go to your email settings page to change these settings at a global level.

You could be a member of a bunch of groups. Maybe one is really important, and another one you don’t care about so much. To accommodate this, you can have different email settings for different groups: you can go to the group page and choose to be emailed about all activity, just new threads and proposals, or nothing.

Similarly, you can configure your email settings for specific threads.

(Note, this all applies to the new Loomio interface. The old beta interface has similar behaviour, but it is described with different language.)

Design ideas

Right now, there are couple of big ideas I want to explore:

• Set loud defaults to engage new members, and make it really easy for them to turn the volume down when they arrive.
• Give the speaker and the audience control over the volume: start a quiet thread, or make an announcement.

Make it easy to turn the volume down

Let’s assume that we change the defaults, so when you first join Loomio, you get an email every time there is new activity in your group. (You’ll notice a lot of other tools do this, as it helps people build a new habit.)

With luck, your group gets really engaged, and there’s heaps of activity. At this point, you’re thinking, “wow it’s cool that I can be involved in decisions without going to a meeting, but sheish Loomio sends so many emails! There must be a way to turn that off!”

Then without having to hunt for it, you see a really obvious button to change your emails settings. You open the email settings form, read it for a few seconds and think ‘yeah, makes sense’. You tick a few boxes and get on with your life, never having to worry about it again. Aaaaah, email freedom.

The devil is in the details so I’m going to draw some picture to illustrate this story. I’m keen to hear other stories and see other pictures too, so feel free to share in this thread :)

Give the speaker and the audience control over the volume

At the moment, the “volume” is totally up to the the audience to control: you change your email settings to configure how much email you receive. I reckon it might be useful to also give some control to the speaker.

Imagine you want to discuss an idea, but you’re not ready to announce it to everyone in your group: it would be cool if you could start the thread quietly, and bring people in gradually.

Or maybe you have an announcement that is really important for everyone in your group to hear about. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could guarantee that everyone is going to receive it?

Maybe someone wants to draw some pictures for this idea too :P

Share what you know

So I’m wondering: how do you use Loomio email settings? What frustrations do you have? What works really well for you?

Thinking about other tools you use - where have you seen the email settings work really well? How have they solved this challenge?