Platform Alerting
Raising awareness to marketers when something goes wrong
Challenge
System issues disrupted client communication, leading to missed engagement opportunities and potential revenue loss for marketers. Without proactive alerting, users lacked visibility into critical workflow disruptions.
Objective
Implement a robust alerting system that proactively notifies users about system issues in upstream workflows. By ensuring timely and clear alerts, we aimed to empower users to take action before issues impacted their campaigns.
Impact
Though shifting priorities delayed implementation, we established a scalable alerting framework, providing a strong foundation for future development when business needs realign.
01 Research
User interviews
Pendo analytics
02 Strategy
Prod/UX Alignment
03 Design
Design direction
Competitors
04 Feedback
First impressions
Final direction
05 Follow Up
Priority Shift
01 Research
Through Pendo, we kicked out a short survey to understand how important different platform alerts were to our users. 9 of 86 users took the survey and 3 confirmed to meet for more discussion.
Highlights
Excessive False Alarms
Users found the alert system was triggering too many "false" alarms, leading them to be turned off. ​
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Lack of Automation
There is a manual check process in place to monitor crucial metrics. This was tedious and time-consuming.
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Inefficient Communication Channels
Users expressed a preference to have alerts through Slack instead of email. Emails became overwhelming and difficult to manage.
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Product & UX Alignment
02 Strategy
Faster awareness for clients
Higher feature adoption of alerting
Solve for blank-slate problems
Product goals
User goals
Global alerts
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Internal user
groups
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Reusable alert
pattern
To understand and take action on alerts
To be able to set alerts once
To be able to loop in other coworkers
Must haves
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A central place to monitor alerts
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Providing default alerts to the high traffic and desired areas from our research
Nice to haves
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Having the ability to add alerts to a daily report vs immediate send
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Having the ability to send the alerts to a list of internal users vs entering emails manually
Delightful
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Ability to have a webhook as a means of communication method
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Being able to set priority on different alerts
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AI detection before assets reach a critical state
03 Design
Alignment
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Central location for all alerts broken up by channel
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Ability to select preferences on when to receive alerts and who
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Straight-forward rule comprehension
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History tab to see a running feed of previously triggered alerts
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Custom alert rules tab to create asset specific alerts
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04 Feedback
Highlights
Bootbarn
The ability to set alerts on specific KPIs would significantly improve their workflows.
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Virgin Voyages
The custom alert rules would be better placed at the individual asset level.
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Planet Art
Instead of a 'reminder' or being notified immediately, we'd like a daily alert summary.
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Final Direction
Notification Feed
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Introduced an alert feed to help users track triggered events throughout their workweek, with error badges highlighting assets causing critical issues.
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Enable users to click notifications to navigate directly to the asset triggering the alert for further investigation.
Global Alerts
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Allow users to set global defaults for all assets of a specific type.
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Enable alerts to be sent to internal groups, with the option to send immediately or as part of a daily summary.
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Easily see history that falls outside of the notification feed timeline.
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05 Follow Up
Priority Shift
While this project didn’t ultimately get shipped due to shifting priorities, it provided a valuable opportunity to explore how to improve the alerting system and lay the groundwork for future use cases.
I created new components designed to support the next version of alerting, as well as potential future features like rule building and feed components.
These components were intentionally lightweight to allow for easy iteration and future improvements.
