This may have been brought up before but does anyone get much use from the notifications page? (https://www.patreon.com/notifications)
It tells me that I have notifications but it is really hard to decipher which are new notifications. This is true on the Patreon App (Android) and the page in a browser.
I wish it was possible to hide all notifications that have already been looked at. Many times I miss a correspondence opportunity with a Patron because I miss the notification.
Hmmm, I find these pages work OK for me (I’m on Mac desktops and iPhone) but the badge icon on the Patreon app always shows that I have 2 notifications, no matter how many I really have — wish I could clear it!
I did file this as an issue with the product team, because I can only imagine that this is annoying!
I normally use Chrome and I see the number of notifications in the Patreon sidebar in the browser, but once I go to the notifications page, there’s no indication which ones are “new”.
In the past, I saw a little orange dot on some (but not all) of the “new” ones. At some point that disappeared, though.
Not sure whether it is browser-dependent.
Ugh, that notifications page! Just wanted to jump in and let you know that the Creator Experience team is aware of the, ahem, challenges with this page.
I’d love to hear what type of information you’d expect to see in notifications. What would be useful to you? What is completely NOT useful to you that’s already there? Is the main challenge just determining which are read / unread?
eb
It would be very helpful if we could just mark “all as read” with a button. This would remove all notifications from the page and there would be nothing on the page until something new happens. I wouldn’t think that would be hard to implement and would make the page much more useful. Or have a toggle switch to view all notifications or to view only new unread notifications.
Hi Erin, to start with they NEED to be chronological! The order right now is bizarre and confusing. It’s trying to be smart, but notifications really need to be dumb and obvious. Things I for one would really like to be notified of:
Well, first of all, it’s important for the notifications to be chronological order, so the newest are on top. Besides that, as others have said, new ones should be marked in some way. Could be a dot, or change of background color like on Twitter.
Essential information:
Useful:
Rather less useful (in my opinion):
Note that there are a lot of issues with duplication of notifications:
The notification “Your patrons have been charged for Month. $Value has been added to your account balance.” often shows up duplicated. I just had the one for November show up 4 times in a row even.
The notification “Success! Your pledges for your creators have gone through. Thanks for all of your support!” appears duplicated sometimes as well.
The monthly summary has a “Show More” link that consistently duplicates the ones that were already shown the first time you click it.
Some notifications appear to get duplicated when they are at the bottom of the page and you scroll down, causing more to get loaded.
Thanks for the detailed feedback! I’ll be working through this with my design partner as we think about iterating on the experience. Looks like we’ve got some pretty cringe-y behavior to change.
Something i’ve noticed: People can get removed for breaking community guidelines, however, this doesn’t remove them from your current patrons list. You still have to go through and block them one at a time from your patron list. It would be REALLY great if these patrons would automatically be removed and a notification shown that it happened so you aren’t inevitably going “did someone leave? why did my income go down?”
In order of importance.
Essential information:
New pledge, cancelled pledge, changed pledge
Useful:
The monthly summary of pledge changes
Patrons have been charged $Value
Your pledges have gone through message (would be nice to add the amount I was charged!)
Comments
Rather less useful (in my opinion):
Likes (do not include these)
I would say the biggest problem with desktop notifications right now is that there is no indication of what I am being notified about.
A notification can indicate a new like, a new comment, a community post, a new pledge - and when I click the notification icon to view them, there’s no indication which is new because they aren’t sorted by newness, they are sorted by category and date. Even at low activity levels it can confusing to remember which notification was the last you looked at in any category - “oh I have 3 more comments and a new pledge, but it said I have 6 notifications, were the other 2 just likes?”
There is no sorting mechanism to just look at everything new that has happened since your last visit or clearly see what those new notifications are, and there’s also no filtering mechanism to turn off notifications for things like “likes” that aren’t really that important.
I think a simple way to fix this would be to ask yourself “why should I click on the notification icon, what am I expecting?” - For me I click it so I can see what’s happened since I last came to my patreon page, and unfortunately, it doesn’t fulfill that role because it’s not ordered or marked in a way that I can easily see that.
Hmm, this is super interesting. I’m going to add this to my list of things to investigate!
Thanks so much for all of the replies! We’ve clearly got some work to do.
I agree with the last few lists of priorities.
And to be completely clear, when a patron pledges and then a few hours or days later quits, I want to see both the pledge notification and the quit notification for that person (whereas right now after they quit it seems to show neither, as if it never happened – but I have the pledge email to prove I’m not crazy).
Oh, also: PLEASE a notification for when someone puts their pledge on hold for a month!
Right now they just semi-disappear and I have to figure it out and ask them if that’s really what’s going on. That’s awkward and intrusive – there should be a notification saying “John Smith put their pledge on hold for November” and then I could take the right action without bothering them about it.
Here’s a regular thing that happens to me:
Grouping notifications by type is confusing, since I can never really be sure I’ve acknowledged everything. Either of these two different approaches would be better for me:
A. Don’t group anything. Just a steady, chronological stream of likes, new patrons, dropped patrons, thread comments.
B. Group, but keep unseen and seen notifications separate. Never group them. So if I have 30 post comments, but only 3 of them are new, I’d see two items: the 3 new posts grouped, and the 27 old ones grouped.