A very typical UX writing assignment – a value prop prompt to turn on notifications – with a bit of a technical challenge.
Challenge:
With the addition of appointment scheduling, editing, and cancelling to the Vanguard app, a constant thorn in our metaphorical side flared up once more – the issue of appointment no-shows. Some tens of millions are lost every year from clients not showing up for their scheduled advisor appointments, wasting time slots that could have been used for productive advisor-client discussions. Life can happen sometimes; we miss meetings because something more pressing came up, something urgent needed our attention, or maybe… we just forgot it was on our schedule. Oops!
Naturally, our next move was to implement appointment reminder notifications and a value proposition to encourage users to enable them.
Process:
One major concern with this implementation was our “all-or-nothing” push notification behavior – due to technical constraints, if you turn on push for appointments (or anything else), you’ll also be turning on push notifications for everything else (luckily there are only two others for now). For the sake of transparency, we needed some way to tip this off to users while keeping it relevant to appointment reminders.
Outcomes:
The most important part of making sure the value prop was valuable, relevant, and non-invasive was its placement in the flow: right after a client has scheduled or rescheduled an appointment. A short, sweet market-y headline and “stay on top of your schedule” messaging keep it relevant to appointment notifications, while “other alerts” and “your finances” tip the client off to the fact that there are other notifications to be had before we can implement individual toggles for each push notification type.
Benjamin Chen 