Notifications playbook

A notifications playbook for any app that tells people something happened. It covers choosing the channel, push notifications, text messages and an in-app inbox. It is for the people who build the sending code and the agents that help them.

Every notification costs the reader attention, and a text message also costs you money. Send too many and people turn them all off, often at the operating system level, where you cannot win them back. So most rules here are about sending less, at the right time, on one channel.

Start with Channels and preferences. It sets up the catalogue, consent and limits that every channel reads before it sends.

Email has its own email playbook, and these rules link to it instead of repeating it. Queues and retries follow the outbox rule, and abuse limits live in adversarial testing.

Chapters

1. Channels and preferences

   List every notification in one catalogue, ask before marketing, honour each person's choices and quiet hours, and send one message per event.

   • Required 7
   • Recommended 1

2. Push notifications

   Ask for permission after a click that explains why, send through the standard push services with short lives, and drop dead subscriptions at once.

   • Required 5
   • Recommended 2

3. Text messages

   Register every sender, confirm each opt-in, obey STOP at once, keep texts to one segment and guard the send button against SMS pumping fraud.

   • Required 5
   • Recommended 3

4. In-app notifications

   Keep every notification in a server inbox, sync read state everywhere, deliver new items live, and announce them to screen readers without moving focus.

   • Required 2
   • Recommended 3

All 28 rules on one page