Portfolio of Christina Fowler

In January 2020 I began to explore the potential of notifications within the BBC Sport App. The app already offered notifications to users who could receive match alerts from their favourite teams and top sporting stories from the editorial team.

The initial aim of my work was to improve Sport app notification service to drive feature adoption and engagement, as well as overall increased Sport app usage.

New ideas

In order to explore the potential for notifications I designed and facilitated a workshop to explore how we might acquire, retain and engage users through push notifications. The workshop generated over 200 ideas in two hours.

Based on a recommendation from my product manager I explored a new product idea process that was based on a medium article from a Google product manager. This process involved documenting all 200 of the ideas and then facilitating smaller workshops with the editorial and development teams. I worked with the teams to rank all ideas for Impact and Ease.

The final step I took was to adapt a confidence calculator that was referenced in the medium article to calculate how likely each idea was to succeed. The calculator gives a score where team agreement gives a low confidence and usability studies and A/B experiments gives a high score. By combining the confidence score with the impact and ease scores I was able to produce a list of top ideas.

With the list of top scoring ideas I mocked up all of the options in Sketch. These options included theming the notification onboarding for big events, shortening the journey and adding additional prompts throughout the app to encourage subscribers.

I began to work on a workshop which would help us to generate ideas for converting more existing users to subscribe to notifications however, shortly after my work on notification ideas the app priorities moved to focus on topics within the app instead. My work then pivoted to focus on the onboarding for the app.