We had a hunch that such a trade-off should be avoidable: if users are more satisfied with their experience, we believe this would be reflected in usage gains too. We decided to keep the experiment of sending only a few notifications running for a year. And lo and behold: little by little Facebook usage started inching back up! After a year we saw that in the fewer notifications experience, users were using Facebook more — it just took a long time for user behavior to shift and less disruption led to high organic usage, which increased both user satisfaction and app usage. We wrote this blogpost to socialize this finding as we believe other data science teams outside Facebook could benefit from the same lessons we learnt:
Weijun C., Yan Q., Yuwen Z., Christina B., Akos L.
- Experiments in the very long-run can show different results than in the short run.
- Sending only a few notifications and the most relevant ones (e.g. those predicted to receive a 5/5 rating in the survey mentioned above) can improve user sentiment and usage too in the long run.
Seems a rather obvious insight that people become frustrated with high volumes of notifications, and after a short period of increased engagement they start to pay less attention to them. This is especially true as people tend to add more friends and follow more sources over time, and Facebook crams new features into the feed, both contributing to even more notifications. But it’s nice to see this confirmed with actual research and, as far as I understand from this post, implemented into real product changes at Facebook.
Google conducted long-term research about ad placements some years ago as well, which yielded similar conclusions. Hopefully these findings translate into Instagram product design as well, I could use less notifications about Reels. Now that I think about it, LinkedIn could also tone down its notification levels drastically – who wants to see tens of prompts about random and remote business connections every day?
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