Push Notifications in Mobile Apps

[moiz994]

Abstract

Currently, the edX mobile app lacks any push notification functionality, resulting in missed opportunities for increasing user engagement and retention. Push notifications can significantly enhance user interaction by providing timely reminders, updates, and personalized content. Implementing a push notification strategy aligns with our goal to improve the overall user experience and engagement on the mobile app.

Detailed Product Proposal

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/4982079504/Push+Notifications+in+Mobile+Apps

Context & Background (in brief, if a Product Proposal is linked above)

The edX mobile app currently lacks push notification functionality, leading to missed opportunities for user engagement and retention. Introducing push notifications functionality can enhance user interaction through timely reminders and personalized content.

Scope & Approach (in brief, if a Product Proposal is linked above)

Our push notification strategy for the edX mobile app is divided into two categories:

• Learning Experience: Focused on course reminders, content alerts, discussion updates, and motivational messages that enhance the learning experience.
• Promotional Messaging: Targeting course upgrades and promotional offers.

We are prioritizing Learning Experience notifications due to their higher relevance to the native learning experience, and user studies indicate that learning-focused notifications hold more value for learners.

Value & Impact (in brief, if a Product Proposal is linked above)

Expected Impact:

• Learners: Increased motivation to complete courses, engage with content, and stay informed about updates.
• Educators: Higher course completion rates and improved engagement metrics.
• Platform: Enhanced user retention, increased course enrollments, and potential revenue growth.

Milestones and/or Epics

Milestone 1 - Learning Experience: Discussions Notifications
Focuses on enhancing learner engagement through push notifications related to discussions, aligning with existing web notifications under the "Activity" preference. Notifications include updates on new responses, comments, endorsements, and posts the learner is following.

Milestone 2 - Learning Experience: Learner Motivation Notifications
Targets re-engaging learners through mobile-specific notifications that prompt continued course interaction. These notifications are centered around motivating course completion, celebrating milestones, encouraging streaks/goals, reminding of course upgrade deadlines, and re-engaging dormant learners.

Named Release

Ulmo

Timeline (in brief, if a Product Proposal is linked above)

As part of our first milestone, Discussions notifications. We will introduce the following notifications as they link with the existing notifications created by the Infinity Squad (
Notifications for learning activity +
Architecture - Notifications for learning activity ).

We should be able to launch in 1 month if no significant delays are seen.

Proposed By

2U

Additional Info

No response

[github-actions]

Thanks for your submission, @openedx/openedx-product-managers will review shortly.

[kdmccormick]

There is consensus that this is the right direction. There are a couple minor disagreements above, particularly around choices of terms/languages that edX.org would like their users to see vs. what are appropriate defaults for Open edX.

Decision

• We will consider Milestone 1 this proposal Approved with @moiz994 and @jawad-khan ' s team leading the implementation.

• We would like @marcotuts to be tagged for review on pull requests which add new user-facing strings to the mobile apps for this project.

  • @marcotuts , please make sure you’re available to review those strings as the PRs are made, or if you’re unavailable, appoint someone else who can.

  • @moiz994 , please work with Marco to make sure the strings being added are appropriate for Open edX, and that any edX.org-specific strings are implemented as overrides in edX’s app.

  • If disagreements arise that can’t be settled in review, they should be messaged #wg-product-ux-ui or brought to the next Product UX/UI WG meeting.

  • If it’d make sense, perhaps the strings could be reviewed in bulk ahead of time in order to speed up the PR review process. Moiz and Marco, I’ll leave that up to you to work out.

• Future Milestones should go through a product re-review phaase.

[kdmccormick]

In development: openedx/edx-platform#36272

[kdmccormick]

Sorry @moiz994 , one last bit of bureaucracy, could you please make another Platform Roadmap issue specifically for Milestone 1 (Discussions Push Notifications) and link it as a sub-task of this issue? You don't need to re-justify it; you can just point directly to this issue and to the product proposal as your description and justification, and we can consider it approved for development.

[moiz994]

No problem. I'll look into that.