Inbox Alert

Email is dying, but staying in touch is more important than ever. How do you do it? The critical component in any social media experience is of users knowing that a message is waiting for them.

You could send an SMS, tweet an @reply, send a mobile push notification on Android and iOS, show a popup within the web app, or send plain old email. Some of these allow responding directly to the notification, others don’t. Some may not reach the user at all, while others will annoy them with too frequent updates.

As a user experience designer, how do you decide what message to send over what channel, and how often? What are the options, and what are the sane defaults?

• Twitter now sends email updates for @replies
• Facebook sends SMS updates from multiple numbers, so they can keep track of what you are replying to
• Mobile messengers like Kik will send you an email reminder if messages could not be delivered to your device
• Google Latitude will tell you when a friend from afar visits your neighbourhood

As a programmer, how do you make the technology work?

• Email updates require a thorough anti-spam and bounce management strategy
• Facebook built their messaging system in Erlang to handle the complexities of many-to-many messaging
• Service providers like Urban Airship provide a unified API for mobile push notifications
• SMS providers like SMS GupShup provide a callback API that tells you whether the message was delivered or not

Inbox Alert is a day of discussions on how you stay in touch, and how you make it seem effortless.