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Cover image for Improve your product notifications with Digest, Separate Feeds, and Notification Action Buttons
Omer Ben Ami for novu

Posted on • Originally published at novu.co

Improve your product notifications with Digest, Separate Feeds, and Notification Action Buttons

Product Notification - What are those?

Product Notifications are everywhere - Emails, SMSs, Push notifications, Direct providers such as Slack , and In-app(known as Notification Center). Basically, product notifications are any way through which products communicate key messages to end-users.
Notifications

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Scale - when things get complicated

When companies grow, tens or hundreds of emails and other notifications are sent - one-time password emails, weekly digests, product updates, product-led growth (PLG) emails, member invites, and so on. Once you have more than three types of emails to manage, another layer with the complexities of managing multiple notifications templates comes up. Furthermore, as companies grow, you'll have users in different channels, all requiring custom notifications daily.

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Manage notifications complexity and create a better user experience

Digest

Imagine your company has an app where users interact with each other's content. Whenever you post content, users get a notification for each and every like or comment – how tedious would that be? No user will keep your app's notifications on if that's the experience they'll get.

Digest (sometimes called "batches") is a way to aggregate individual notifications into a "super" notification at a predefined time. You can also define parameters that determine the intervals in which users get notifications. So notifications are “digested” or “batched” into one message and sent at the end of the day or the interval you define.

![Digest]

Call to action buttons

When you get a friend request over Facebook, you can usually see that the notification has a call-to-action inside.
Confirm or Cancel - This is the simplest form of two-way communication, which is essential for any product to have.

With Novu, you can customize those buttons, and to have as many as needed so your end-users are called to action.

Call to action

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Different feeds of notifications

Notification Feeds are the tabs-like feeds seen in the notification center for different kinds of notifications.
It can be:
One for likes, one for comments (like Reddit).
One for Inbox, one for following (like Notion)
One for all, One for unread (like Facebook)

Feeds

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What happens next?

Companies add notifications incrementally as they grow, and notifications management becomes a nightmare. Another possibility is that companies choose to build a notifications product in-house from scratch. As I see it, neither option makes sense; 99% of startups die, and building a notifications product from scratch gets you closer to becoming part of this statistic.

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Novu

Novu is the first open-source notifications infrastructure built by developers for developers. It's a one-stop shop for all things notifications, just like Stripe for payments.

Developers worldwide can quickly implement our infrastructure without the hassle of building a notifications system from scratch so they can focus on what matters to their company.
https://github.com/novuhq/novu

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⭐️⭐️ I am happy to announce Novu new version 0.6.0!!! ⭐️⭐️

Now you can:

  • Create your own user journey using the drag-and-drop workflow editor.
  • Put notifications into digest (batch).
  • Create different feeds of notifications.
  • Add buttons (action items) inside your notifications.

I want to thank all our amazing contributors, we couldn't do it without you!
See the full list of contributors here:
https://github.com/novuhq/novu/releases/tag/v0.6.0

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Novu is looking for new contributors!

Come help us out to build the best open-source notification infrastructure, get recognized by the community, and become a Community Hero here:
https://novu.co/contributors/
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We are always looking for your inputs so we can build together the best notifications user experience. Any new ideas? Write me in the comments below 👇👇👇👇

Top comments (8)

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combarnea profile image
Tomer Barnea

Awesome 🚀

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David

Finally, a Digest system

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bap_33 profile image
bap

But, could you add a new feature, such as logging, so that we can see the error when it occurs? I just tested the send email feature, but I'm getting an error while sending email with the provider, and I'm not sure what the problem is.

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David

Hi Bap! Have you checked it in the activity feed?
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bap_33 profile image
bap

I've checked but it just appeared as a red dot with a pop-up " error while sending email with the provider"

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scopsy profile image
Dima Grossman

Thanks for raising this up @bap a rich activity feed logs for easier debuggining of sent workflows is really high on our list. In some cases we can't know the reason of the failure since the provider returns a 200 succcess, to get the details on bounces and other delivery related problems we will connect with the providers webhooks to better articulate the actual delivery result. Would love to keep you up to date with the progress on it.

And in the meanwhile would love to assist in any way I can feel free to reach out on Discord or any other channel that works for you 🙏

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bap_33 profile image
bap

Yah, Thanks for this improvement

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nevodavid profile image
Nevo David

Come and join us Bap!
discord.novu.co