As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to design concepts for notifying users, given the proposed limits on the upcoming experience notification API. Currently, the proposed limits state the following:
However, for nearly all proposed use-cases, this unfortunately isn’t ideal. To go over a few use-cases that were directly mentioned in the post:
Only this final use-case is ideal to use notifications with. A user may receive multiple ‘pet hatches’ or ‘base attacks’ within a 3-day period, and at that point, we have only two options to ensure we get a notification to the user. Let’s take a look at the pet hatch example and also assume that our given player is quite forgetful, which isn’t unreasonable to assume given that the player needs notifications.
Option 1: Players structure their pet hatches as so their pets all hatch near the same time-period as so they still receive the notification and don’t forget! This isn’t ideal because it requires setup on behalf of the player. This also requires players to know about the 3-day limit.
Option 2: Developers opt to only send the notification upon the last egg hatch. This also isn’t ideal because in order for it to work we need to assume that another egg won’t hatch for 3 days (IE: the player doesn’t add a new egg for hatching after receiving the notification, which will hatch before our quota has refreshed) and if eggs are set to hatch at far away times from each other (for example, one egg is going to hatch in 1 hour while another will in 2 days) players will be possibly up to 3 days late to get the notification.
A possible solution:
A simple solution to this would be to remove or massively reduce this limit while making same-experience notifications take up one ‘notification slot’ yet also have an ‘arrow button’ to expand other sent notifications from that experience under that notification. This could be confusing, so here is what YouTube does for this:
Minimised notification; ideally, if added to Roblox, we could receive the most recent notification here rather than just a notification count as that is probably more important to players aswell as an arrow button to show it can be expanded:
Expanded notification, all notifications are shown regardless of how many videos were uploaded by the creator (or in the case of Roblox, how many notifications we send):
These lists would ideally be separated per experience.
As for push notifications, both Android and Apple support notification grouping, which would allow for the same system to be used there.
I know feature requests aren’t for proposing solutions, but seemingly, my ‘proposed solution’ has client side UI already implemented into the mobile client! Possibly as an A/B test. I recently received a ‘friend request received notification’, which was expandable to show all the users who sent me a friend request while still remaining in the notification menu.
As for concerns that ‘one experience could flood your whole notification stream’ it’s worth keeping in mind that the player opted in for notifications, if they continue to keep notifications enabled then they clearly care about the notifications from that experience. How often those notifications are sent has also been somewhat ‘accepted’ by the user in the long-term just by their continued use of having them enabled.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because it would make it much easier to design around notifications within my experience.