Loomio Community

Wed 25 Nov 2015 1:05AM

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

Richard D. Bartlett Public Seen by 322

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

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.

Email settings page

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

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?

Gina Rembe Wed 25 Nov 2015 5:09AM

Thanks for raising this! I use the general feature a lot, but definitely find it confusing. For me, when I adjust notifications the window that pops up is an 'either, or', not 'mix and match to suit your needs'. So perhaps even a line that says 'tick all that you want' kinda thing could be really useful.

Another thing I've been pondering is a summary email from all the things I've muted/toned down (maybe once a month or so) that showss what's going on. Threads might increase in relevance again, but I don't know unless I consciously dig through the groups and recent threads. Hope that makes sense?

Richard D. Bartlett Wed 25 Nov 2015 5:24AM

Thanks Gina, I award you 100 Internet Points for those two insights :)

Greg Cassel Wed 25 Nov 2015 5:56AM

I don't have much headspace for this right now, but the two big design ideas make a ton of sense to me. Hope to hear from others!

Robert Guthrie Thu 26 Nov 2015 12:13AM

I think there are a few things we can do to make it simpler now:
- Add a checkbox "Apply this setting to all threads in the group" for both group and thread notifications modals.
- Maybe move from notification settings cards to something that feels more more integrated. (the dropdowns were actually pretty great)
- improve the footer of thread emails to make them simpler and clearer

In the future I think that a system like the following would work well:
There is a concept of being notified. Each user chooses how to receive their notifications, either by immediate email, digest email or in app (or some combination).

You can choose to 'notify' people (or, to not notify anyone) by adding them to the thread when you start it, or mentioning them during the conversation.

When you start a thread, if you assign it to a group, then you can choose if it is an "announcement" which will notify the whole group. Otherwise the thread will just show up in recent threads and the summary email, allowing people from the group to drift in as it suits them. You can also notify just a few people to get the thread humming then later on more people will see it in their feed.

Am I missing something? Does that make sense?

Ethan Winn Fri 27 Nov 2015 2:44PM

I appreciate Ginas points also, and +1 the digest idea. An issue I've encountered is comment notification drowning out deadline updates, etc. Being able to digest the former and make the latter loud would be great.

Blue sky wish would be some dashboard for helping to wrangle participants. We've found personal reach out a must have in order to get quorum on many threads. This often means calling out a bunch of folks in chat, and having a thread facilitator who tracks. Having tools to support such facilitation would be awesome.

Richard D. Bartlett Fri 27 Nov 2015 8:40PM

Also, let's make a feature so I can like that comment twice @ethanwinn - the wrangler's dashboard is a freakin great idea!

Alanna Irving Sun 29 Nov 2015 6:26AM

I don't use email notifications myself, but when I was doing some user testing/interviewing recently I learned about some groups looking to replace an existing email list (or even worse, a culture of massive "reply all" emailing without list management). If people are migrating off an all-email system, telling them "Loomio will email you everything, and you can reply by email - it's a lot like your current system, but with better archiving and clear decisions" makes a ton of sense to them. I wonder if part of the setup process could take into consideration where a group is coming from, and that would be relevant to the default settings for users who join?

Poll Created Wed 9 Mar 2016 1:55AM

I’ve reviewed the proposed changes to the email settings and provided feedback Closed Sun 13 Mar 2016 9:08PM

Outcome

by Richard D. Bartlett Mon 27 Feb 2017 10:21PM

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I have updated the designs with some language tweaks.

I expect this will be built and deployed by the end of the week :four_leaf_clover:

We’ve designed the next iteration of the Loomio email settings:
https://goo.gl/7mjyQv

Before we build this, it would be great to hear from more people:

do you agree with the problems named in the design doc?
do you have other problems with Loomio emails that aren’t named here?
looking at the new settings page and modals, do you understand the options?
are you confident you could configure your email settings to behave the way you want them to?
is the language clear?

Please ‘agree’ on this proposal once you’ve reviewed and given feedback :heart:

Note: unfortunately this design process is not fully accessible to people who are blind as it relies on visual mockups. We’ll be working separately with an expert to confirm the accessibility of the new software development though.