In case you missed previous issues:

• What I learnt about presentation from Google’s Pixel 9 event

• The coolest way to learn/capture things online

Sharing is… awesome:

If you can think of somebody that might be a tech imposter like me and you think they would like to read this, please share it with them. Oh and feel free to reply to this newsletter, keen to chat to you.

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In this edition 🎉

A super deep dive into push notifications. I wanted to be as tactical as possible and give useful insight into what strategies you can implement… but… because I talk too much, I have had to break this issue up into (at least) 2 parts.

— Part 1 (this issue)

• Common gotchas

• Respecting user attention

• What to say?

— Part 2 (coming soon)

• When to say it?

• Where to say it?

• Who to say it to?

• When the user blocks you

— Part 3 (if you are interested)

• The Duolingo case study

Reply/Comment and let me know if there is anything else you would like me to cover. And with that, let’s get started…

Let’s get these out of the way

To start, why don’t we run through a few quick fire things before we jump into the rest of this issue. Here’s what we know:

• Just because you send a notification doesn’t mean a user will get it

• Notifications are bad/irritating

• Notifications are great/valuable

• Yup… that wasn’t a typo, both of these things can be true ⚖️

• The way notifications work changes often (almost annually with each new Android/iOS version)

• Effective push notifications are more of a product management challenge than a technical/implementation challenge

• As the senders of push notifications, we often don’t think too hard about what it is like to be on the receiving end

• It’s probably faster for your user to delete your app than to change the push notification settings… 🤯 (test it yourself)

Do push notifications work?

When I was back in Med school I read an article about Medication adherence, the study cited approx 50% of non-intentional non-adherence to medication to have resulted from simply forgetting.

It’s actually one of the main reasons I left seeing patients and started trying to make apps in the first place, let’s remind all of them… right? Wrong…. Here is a cochrane review on the subject. It turns out changing people’s behaviour is really, really difficult. It’s a topic that I find super fascinating and will write about some day (stay tuned).

Back to push notifications.
Do they work?

Let’s ask Duo, the crazy, unhinged owl from the Duolingo app:

Duo would say yes. Hell yes even. And then ask if you have finished your Spanish lessons! Duolingo is currently worth over 7 Billion Dollars and a fair amount of their success is attributed to their push notification strategy.

For context Duolingo once sent 4 million push notifications in 6 seconds. Seriously 🤯. This was the window of opportunity they had during their ad at the superbowl. And if you are curious, here is a technical breakdown on how they handled that.

Here are another 30 bonus memes… the internet rocks.

So if we have (some) evidence that they work. Let’s get a bit tactical about a good framework to handle them:

Common gotcha’s

We will talk about how to handle most of these a little later in this series.

You are not the boss

By far the most important mistake we make here is forgetting the fact that the person receiving the push is in control. Every phone manufacturer allows your user to decide exactly what notifications they want to receive, when and how.

And when that fails they can just uninstall your app.

Permission must be requested before you can even start sending notifications. And then they can be revoked at almost any point, from outside of your app - you wont even know (unless you handle this specifically).

To make it worse (for you) - Google play protect may automatically revoke permissions if the app hasn’t been used in say 90 days. But hopefully all your users are so engaged that that is not even possible… right?

Users change their phones all the time

Hopefully (for your sake) when your user switches device they will remember to install your app again - or the new phone will help them move everything across from their old device.

Otherwise… you’re out!

Users have multiple devices

If I have two phones, do you want both of them to ring when I get a notification? Or just the one?

If you choose just one, which one is the one…?

You can probably see how this can quickly spiral. It’s worth thinking about if you would like to target users or devices. Having all 50 of my phones ring because you sent a notification might not be the effect you are going for.

It might be midnight

This is particularly important if your app is available across different time zones. But from a more general standpoint, is the information you a trying to send with your notification the kind of info that warrants making my phone ring outside work hours for example?

There are protected times like weekends and public holidays etc that may be a bad time for you to make noise. Depending on your user base and message of course.

If there’s a tornado… I want to know. Otherwise, wait until after 8am.

This other notification is more interesting

The average user in the US gets around 46 push notifications a day. With your luck your push notification is going to appear just underneath the one from that girl they are interested in.

Understanding that you are competing for attention helps to frame the situation. This is your shot… make it count or be buried in a sea of other notifications.

This is my phone, not a billboard on the highway

Watch your tone. A super common gotcha is using the wrong tone or brand voice. My phone is where my friends are, it’s personal. It’s definitely not the space for generic marketing speak.

And please don’t say tap here 💀💀… people know how notifications work.

Don’t be a marketer, be a friend. Use conversational tone in your notifications, and stay far away from vanilla template style messages. Especially if your audience is young - People can tell when something doesn’t seem authentic.

There are modes…

Silent mode, do not disturb mode, vibrate mode… these are all states that a device could be in when your notification lands. Not to say that your message wont be delivered, but the how is important here.

If a message is ultra critical, your user may not get it as urgently as you anticipated.

Push notifications are just a single tool in your messaging toolbox

As you can probably see from all the gotcha’s listed above, push notifications are not the blanket solution that you think they are.

There are a lot of reasons why you need to maintain other channels as well. But more on that in just a little bit.

Respect the user's attention

Notifications are designed to interrupt the user. But you knew that already… that’s why you are so interested in them in the first place.

In the real world, if somebody is eating a meal or hanging out with their family, you would approach interrupting them with caution, paying extra attention to what you have to say, why you have to say it and how to present it to the person you are interrupting.

Push notifications are no different.

Notifications should not be treated like a megaphone, unless they need to be (eg: letting a user know about fraudulent activity on their bank account). Rather aim to be a gentle tap on the shoulder with helpful information - terrible analogy, but you get the point 🙈.

Good apps know this, they strive to be relevant, they let their users choose which interruptions they want to allow (maybe they are ok with balance notifications but not sales). They also try to alert the user at the right time. They try to be helpful.

Have a look at this graph:

Reasons users consider notifications to be spam

The red in the graph represents you - the person that sends the notification, whilst the blue represents the opinions of people that receive notifications.

It’s super interesting to see the places where the senders and receivers differ: relevance and timing are often blindspots as we the senders focus on just getting the message out. For the user though these two have a real impact on user experience.

Graph from The Business of Apps highlighting findings by VWO engage.

TLDR: If you are going to interrupt me… please make sure you are adding value.

What to say?

We have covered quite a bit already, so let’s help you with writers block. What are good messages to send to your users? what should you include?

• Requesting permission

• Make it actionable

• Deeplink to the thing

• Crafting your message

• Welcome messages

• Seasonal messages

• Predictive messages based on engagement

• Educational messages

• New stuff (esp if its stuff they wanted)

Requesting permission

Pretty please don’t just blast the user asking for notification permissions as soon as they open your app for the first time… You want to place the request for notification permissions near a segment in your app where it makes sense.

For example if the user taps the inbox icon, it’s probably a good time to say “Hey if you don’t want to miss a message you can enable notifications”.

Other great implementations are during your onboarding - Zero (fasting app) used to show a stat about how much more likely people are to build a fasting habit when they enable notifications.

Make your notifications actionable

Don’t just give “by the way” information. Try to link the notification to a tangible and valuable action.

“30% chance of rain in Rotterdam today, would you like to see the full forecast?”

Double down on this by making use of shortcut actions on the actual notification, this could change the above notification to:

“30% chance of rain in Rotterdam today”

• [Action] See forecast

• [Action] Remind me

Bonus points if the user can complete the action without even opening the app.

Deeplink to the thing

Great so now your notifications are actionable, they tap on “See forecast” - but when your app opens, it opens up on the homepage… and the forecast is nowhere to be found…

Don’t do that… 💀

Crafting your message

Here are some quick fire things to think about:

• Keep it short, like super short

• Use a relevant picture if possible

• Emojis go in the title, right at the front (can help differentiate your notification)

• Don’t overuse emojis

• Don’t shout at the user (exclamation marks, all caps… nope)

• Conversational tone

• If you can be funny, be funny

Welcome messages

For newcomers think about onboarding holistically, this includes other channels as well. But you want to think along the lines of:

• Is there anything I need to clarify about the app

• How can I show them our most valuable feature (the feature that once used has the highest impact on retention)

• Can we celebrate any action they took

• How can we make them feel welcome

• Did they perform any actions that denote confusion

• How do we prevent a blank page (ie. not knowing where to start)

These are all small ways a useful notification can help a user, prevent confusion and cement a decent relationship.

“Your digital card is ready”
”We started a post for you”
”Need a hand setting up your profile”

Seasonal messages

If you are really stuck about what to say to your user, seasonal messages are a useful way to get a head start. What I mean is:

Literally: “Winter is coming, need flu meds?” - link to precompiled cart

But any real world issue, relevant topic or value you can offer in relation to an event would be a great start.

(During a power outage) “💡 Don’t forget you’re covered for electrical damage” - link to insurance cover page

(During extreme weather) “⛈️ Good time to move your car” - link to full forecast

Engagement based messages

If I order pizza 5 Fridays in a row using your app and today is Friday… I probably want pizza. Don’t be creepy…

But offer me pizza.

Try and find similar hooks in your app as well. These messages can be intuitive and powerful.

Educational messages

The easiest example here is an ecommerce app, If I bought a lawnmower… a useful article about how to get my grass greener than my neighbour’s is probably a good way to get me to engage with your app again.

Yes this kind of thing requires effort, but for an ecomm app if you pick some of your best sellers and do this, you add additional value, based off a real intent (I bought a mower). Your chances of relevance and timeliness are much higher, and your chances of helpfulness are stellar.

(Just landed in Amsterdam) Taxi services near the airport
(Just opened an investment account) 5 things to know about interest rates in *insert country here*

New stuff

Ok we are at the bottom of the barrel 🤣 but these can still be useful if tastefully done. New features!!

Things like, “You can now xxx….”
”We have made xxx a million times better”

Bonus points if you know that the new feature was something the user had been looking for from before. But be tasteful, remember, a wise man once said:

Word of the week

So last issue the word of the week was flywheel. This issue… I’m skipping the word of the week 🙈🫣 This post is prolly too long as it stands lol.

Useful snips from this week

Nearly skipped this too lol but here you go, a couple of snips from podcasts I have been listening to recently that you may find useful.

Feel free to share them:

The last word

Hope you enjoyed this issue. Feel free to message me back with your thoughts, questions or things you would like me to cover.

Thanks as always,
Kofi ☕️

So imagine I gave you the task of making this really big, really heavy gear you see in the pic spin. Physics says you are gonna have a hard time…

You push really hard, and struggle but eventually you get it moving. Once it gains momentum it will get to the point where it kinda starts to maintain it’s own momentum. And eventually becomes really hard to stop.

It’s a metaphor.

Hard at the beginning

Once you pick a direction (this is the important part), make a bet, test a hypothesis and commit to that direction. You are then able to start to gain momentum. It is difficult at the start, but slowly as you start to see results even the other teams within your company start to get behind the direction - and this makes the flywheel start to spin.

Momentum builds if you maintain direction

The caution here is on divided focus or multiple directions. Imagine the people trying to spin the flywheel pushing in different directions… you can’t gain momentum.

Practically this can happen:

• When a company/team is reactive and shifts direction often.

• When the direction is unclear - people who don’t know what direction to push in will invariably push in different directions.

• When your customers don’t get what you promised them eg: you overpromised then underdelivered or they were the wrong customer to start with. Their dissatisfaction will slow your flywheel.

The flywheel never really spins.

Momentum compounds

Happy customers who love your direction will tell their friends. This then compounds the momentum that was initiated by your continuous input in a clear and specific direction.

If you can think of somebody that might be an tech imposter like me and you think they would like to read this, please share it with them. Oh and feel free to reply to this newsletter, keen to chat to you.

For more:

What I learnt about presentation from Google’s Pixel 9 event

In this edition 🎉

• Techtember/Techtober and what events to catch

• Tech word of the week: Flywheel

• My new university for learning things digitally

• Podcasts I’m finding useful this week

Let’s get started…

Do you remember, the 21st night of Techtember…

It’s September and there are so many tech events happening it’s actually funny. I am also eagerly waiting for the 21st of September to post this Earth, Wind and Fire pic:

Every…👏🏾 year… 👏🏾 without… 👏🏾 fail 🤓

Here are the tech events you should check out:

• Meta Connect

• Apple event (you missed it) lol

• Motorola event (yes… they are still around)

• Mobile world congress

I always look for things like pricing, presentation and positioning of products in these events. And these guys are the best at what they do in that regard. But because it’s 2024, take that with a sizeable helping of AI.

For products in 2024 you have to have a stance on the AI elephant in the room and if your products need AI or not. What do you think of Procreate’s stance? (Estimated $26,6 million dollar valuation)

If you want the full list of events for September and October, you can find it here:

Word of the week: Flywheel

So imagine I gave you the task of making this really big, really heavy gear you see in this pic spin. Physics says you are gonna have a hard time…

You push really hard, and struggle but eventually you get it moving. Once it gains momentum it will get to the point where it kinda starts to maintain it’s own momentum. And eventually becomes really hard to stop.

It’s a metaphor.

Hard at the beginning

Once you pick a direction (this is the important part), make a bet, test a hypothesis and commit to that direction. You are then able to start to gain momentum. It is difficult at the start, but slowly as you start to see results even the other teams within your company start to get behind the direction - and this makes the flywheel start to spin.

Momentum builds if you maintain direction

The caution here is on divided focus or multiple directions. Imagine the people trying to spin the flywheel pushing in different directions… you can’t gain momentum.

Practically this can happen:

• When a company/team is reactive and shifts direction often.

• When the direction is unclear - people who don’t know what direction to push in will invariably push in different directions.

• When your customers don’t get what you promised them eg: you overpromised then underdelivered or they were the wrong customer to start with. Their dissatisfaction will slow your flywheel.

The flywheel never really spins.

Momentum compounds

Happy customers who love your direction will tell their friends. This then compounds the momentum that was initiated by your continuous input in a clear and specific direction.

My new university

So you may have heard people say that YouTube is as good as any university.. this is better. Been using this app called Snipd. It is the ridiculously overpowered way to learn stuff on the web.

Premise is super simple, you can’t possibly remember the whole podcast or YouTube video, but you can remember the cogent points. So how do you capture them… with snips. The Snipd app will keep track of the time you snipped the point you wanna remember, then do all sorts of incredible things with it:

• Summarise it

• Contextualise it

• Sync it to Notion or Readwise

• Remind you of it

• Convert into a nice shareable tidbit

• Make it super easy for you to find later

So for all my fav podcasts, but recently also YouTube videos and also my own audio recordings like meetings, calls and quick notes my workflow is to share the content to Snipd and then record the moments that I want to learn from. The rest is history.

Have a look:

Useful snips from this week

Here are a few useful snips from things I listened to in the week, share them if you find them useful:

1. For your personal relationships, take the time to find good quality people. They are worth the wait.
   https://share.snipd.com/post/aba397f4-7be0-4c2a-8fa7-810ef8fd1c3c
   

2. For the people that you love the most, make a difference in their life whilst you are still here. Give them an inheritance when they need it.
   https://share.snipd.com/post/03577209-4e28-41be-b167-2b85aa39bb9e
   

3. When telling stories (useful skill) every story is about a singular “turning point”. Know what that is and craft your narrative around that.
   https://share.snipd.com/post/3740e01f-435c-440e-bc6c-185eb642ce78
   

4. When selling B2B here is a helpful framework for figuring out how to position your product.
   https://share.snipd.com/post/e98b23cb-2e28-455c-8383-68e0f7c0004b

The last word

Hope you enjoyed this issue. Feel free to message me back with your thoughts, questions or things you would like me to cover.

Thanks as always,
Kofi ☕️

So I tend to get excited about Google events, even nowadays when things are leaked and there are no surprises in the actual events anymore. Things are a far cry from Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone.

Still though, my inner geek gets really hyped about… the slides 🤣🤌🏾🔥

Man there is just so much to learn about presentation and positioning from the way these events are handled. So if you are keen, read along and let’s geek out together a bit.

TLDR

• Clean slides

• Golden thread

• My eyes are here

• Handling difficult conversations

• What can your product do for the user

• Summarise

• Put things in context

• Live demos… Or not

Clean slides

Let’s get this out of the way already, “death by powerpoint” is dead. There is literally nothing on this slide. Just a name.

Not Kofi the 3rd, first of his name, the father of cats and presenter of slideshows.

And this is ok. In fact its personal and more authentic. And the dude presenting here is qualified… with a capital Q.

Be authentic, be simple, keep your slides clean.

A golden thread

People relate to stories and telling stories is a skill that you can practice. One powerful tool that people use in presentations is the “callback”. A callback is when you revisit something that you established earlier. It is also a really tactical psychological trick.

Let me explain…

Kevin Hart (love him or not..) is a great story teller. He draws you into his storyline and you feel as though the content is authentic. He tells stories, not jokes. Stand up comedians use the “callback” all the time.

• Pick something important you want to drive home eg. Making AI Helpful for everyone

• Explain the concept

• Keep coming back to it

Google did this positioning their brand (and their flavour of AI) as “Helpful”.

Callbacks serve a few purposes in stand-up comedy:

• They help connect different parts of the performance, making it feel more complete.

• They can make the audience laugh and remember the earlier joke.

• They let the comedian surprise the audience by changing or adding to the original joke.

• They can give the performance a satisfying ending by bringing back something familiar, kinda like going full circle.

Kevin Hart explaining about how his bank account is set up, is a great example of this:

Side note… Don’t overdo it:

In this event, Google made reference to “help” 78 times. I guess they really wanna help you 🤣

My eyes are up here

Lol here’s what I mean… Google used a “resting slide” whenever the speaker wanted you to pay attention to what they were actually saying rather than focus on the slide show.

It was a G 😎

There’s nothing to focus on here… so you have to listen.

The slides are an adjunct.

Not the star of the show.

Handling difficult conversations

We all remember what happened to Microsoft when they announced Windows recall.

It didn’t go well.

And now Google knew they were set to announce something that could be perceived to be similar.

So how come it’s different now?

Positioning.

With your permission, it can offer unparalleled personalized help, accessing relevant information across your Gmail inbox, your Google Calendar…

They clearly address the concerns by repeating the part about “With your permission” and “AI on your device”. It’s simple, it’s succinct but it makes the point. Apple did a similar thing with “Apple intelligence” - their focus was control, you are in control of when things happen on device and when they don’t.

Addressing your customer’s (potential) objections head on is super important.

In order for Gemini to be your go-to, trusted assistant for your most important tasks, it's critical that your personal information is protected and private.

With your permission, a truly capable AI assistant can help you connect your relevant personal data with all the valuable knowledge that Google has organized and made accessible.

Then quickly switch back to what your product can do for the user #Segue… 🔥

What can your product do for the user

If you are doing a presentation, it means you are talking to people. Whilst you have your set of things that you want to achieve by doing your presso - the people that are listening to you have their reasons for being in your audience (hopefully the right audience) and so you have to cater to why they are there.

Overly technical language and unclear examples and use cases are all things that detract from the goal - unless your audience is technical. The aim is to clearly show what benefits a user can gain practically from your product, and not just a spec sheet.

This is a part that Google handled really well in the presentations at the event.

Summarise

By now we are all familiar with Apple’s bento-style summary grids. It has become a trend amongst the design community - and whilst I feel like it is information overload it does make a good point.

In each presentation there should be a handful of key things that you want people to take away from what you are saying. Also, as we have learnt from playing broken telephone, what you say… may not be what people hear.

So this is where repetition comes in. Use it in normal conversations but definitely use it in presentations. In everyday conversation you can say things like:

• Here is what I am hearing…

• Let me quickly recap what you are saying…

• Are you saying…

In presentations, when you get to the end of a particular section, recap what you would like people to remember. Use a slightly different set of adjectives (unless you are using a callback) and reiterate what you wanted to drive home.

Put things in context

Steve jobs famously demonstrated the 1000 songs in your pocket moment that has since become and iconic explanation of putting things in context. Saying the iPod had 256mb of space or whatever the number was definitely doesn’t have the same effect as helping you imagine 1000 musicians sitting in your pocket.

Google kinda did this, but I would argue that saying “The thinnest foldable” is more of a flex than a benefit. A foldable that fits in any jeans… no matter how tight… would have illustrated the same point but more from a user benefit perspective.

Unless your audience is technical, try to stay away from technical specs in areas where they are not necessary. Keep the story focused on the listener and what your product can do for them - how it can improve their lives.

Live demos… Or not

Elephant in the room time?

So like…

Can you see the pain in his face? This still was seconds before the dreaded “something went wrong message” popped up on the screen.

Google has had really unfortunate luck when it comes to these AI demos, remember - That day Google lost $100 million in share value. Because of a live demo.

I mean at this point, did it need to be live? Maybe… in the demos from other companies this part was always live so to compete I guess they felt pressure to. But in your use case, the chances are it doesn’t need to be. Depending on what you are showcasing, the value of a live demo can be negligible if the rest of your presentation is compelling.

A prerecorded video that clearly happens in a natural non simulated environment could go just as far. And when I watch demos (because I’m paranoid) who’s to say that the live demo wasn’t orchestrated in some way anyways - Samsung was famously caught faking photos of the moon in real life.

Think carefully about what you need to illustrate, and see if live plays into that. If not… skip the cringe.

The last word

This was fun to write about, and it was another interesting big tech event to watch. There is still so much more to talk about and learn from things like this. One day we should totally talk about Google’s AI branding… Assistant > Bard > Gemini > Gemini Nano > Man… 😅

Thanks as always,
Kofi ☕️