Driveway – 2021
New Feature: Notification Preferences
Leveraging research to design a best-in-class Notification Preferences feature.
Overview
I worked closely with product and engineering partners to design a best-in-class, scalable Notification Preferences feature using research and moderated user testing to support an MVP launch and beyond.
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Designing and building a new notification preference center within My Driveway (Account Center) will add value to users and the business by providing users with greater control, personalization, and transparency with their Driveway experience—while also improving customer retention and engagement with alternatives to unsubscribe (and enriching customer profile data by providing a home for progressive user data collection).
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As the Senior Product Designer on the Helios team at the time of this project, my role was to create all artifacts for the design evolution as well as coordinate peer feedback and present the final designs for stakeholder approval.
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Project Inception and Planning
I was on board in early 2021 when my product counterpart suggested we prioritize the design and development of a Notification Preferences feature. The motivation was to meet table-stakes legal compliance, but more importantly we were eager to provide our users with the ability optimize for timely and relevant content from Driveway. See Design project brief: Preference center.
Best Practice and Visual Research
Knowing that notification preferences is a ubiquitous product feature, so I began the project by soaking up existing UX best practices and capturing visual research for inspiration. I learned that preference centers typically encompass content, frequency, and channel controls (but rarely all three). Furthermore, I captured a number of best practices (such as automatically saving changes without a user needing to to click a save button).
Design Exploration and Team Feedback
My goal was to design a best-in-class Notification Preferences feature for our users. I explored a wide variety of layouts and interaction patterns at a low fidelity in Figma (using the visual research as inspiration) and then presented the options to design team members for feedback. With their help, I converged on two top approaches to use for moderated user testing.
User Testing & Design Iteration
I determined early on that a moderated usability study (with usertesting.com) would reduce the risk of costly design and engineering re-work. I created and socialized a usability study plan and script for feedback and then moderated five tests using two different prototypes. For the sake of time, these tests reflected a hybrid of usability and concept testing.
I invited product and engineering partners to watch and take notes so they could see and empathize with our users. I then synthesized the data into a report that I shared with product and engineering partners, and iterated on the designs to incorporate what we learned.
Stakeholder Approval and Engineering Hand-off
The final step of every project at Driveway before engineers can begin work is presenting designs at a company-wide meeting for the CTO and VP to review and approve. We presented a Figma demo deck that showcased our vision for how notification preferences could accommodate future growth and then segued to our intended MVP launch version.
Stakeholders challenged the business logic of placing an ‘Unsubscribe all’ button at the top of the page but I successful overcame their objection by articulating what we had learned from user testing: users who do not want any notifications expect to be able to quickly turn them off and otherwise lose trust in a brand when they struggle to do so.
Following a successful review, I packaged up the designs for engineers in a production-ready Figma file.
Retro
In retrospect, I would have pushed harder for a second round of user testing to validate the second round of designs that I iterated on from the first round of testing.