Although this hasn’t changed completely, today, users expect much more from an app than just the ability to check information and KPIs. One of the main requirements we analyzed when talking to our clients is about pro-actively providing information and updates.
What does that mean in detail? Users no longer want to have the necessity to check an app for updates but want to get informed whenever something happens.
Airline Dashboard Best Practices: Mobile Push-Notifications
It seems obvious that mobile push notifications are the perfect function to achieve this goal. However, notifications are double-edged swords. They can be helpful for a user, but much too often, they result in user annoyance.
That’s why it’s essential to get them right for the overall user experience.
The User Value
Therefore, we took a step back and thought about the user value we want to deliver with notifications: To define what is valuable for a user, you first need to know what is the user’s pain.
The target group of airline operations dashboards are typically top-managers, executives, operations staff, etc.; these people face the following problems and challenges:
- so many topics
- so little time
- so much data/information
- too detailed reports
- being informed in time
In this situation, a notification system is valuable, if it delivers:
- the most important information only
- in a compact form
- and fully automated.
Based on that, there are three types of information that can be called the most important:
- information relevant to the central business objectives
- operational alerts (e.g., significantly dropping OTP, Arrivals that are more than 3 hours late, …)
- resolution of operational alerts (e.g., rising OTP, runways reopened at hub airport, …)
Bearing that in mind, we defined three types of push-notification for our product. Therefore, the following paragraphs provide an overview of possible push-notifications.
Messages
Messages are the most natural type of push notifications. They can be triggered by users whenever something important happens. Therefore, our solution provides an interface to enter messages, mark them as notifications, and send them out to other stakeholders.
A second option we provide is in applying rules to incoming data and automatically send out push notifications whenever a state is matched. Here’s an example of how these push notifications can look on the recipient’s mobile.
Monitoring
The second use case is about monitoring the most important KPIs. These notifications provide context generated information to inform the user about business-relevant issues. Let’s give you two examples of how this can look.
On-time performance
We differentiate two cases for on-time performance notifications.
a) The KPI drops by a defined value within a specified timeframe.
b) The KPI is back to an acceptable level.
Regularity
Notifications are sent out whenever the KPI target is missed.
Highlights
These notifications are triggered at a particular time to inform about the current status of KPIs that are relevant to the main business objectives. With our product, we are planning to send out three highlights each day.
One in the morning containing the goals of the day.
One in the afternoon to provide a status of the current operations
One in the late evening to summarize the achieved performance of the day.
Finally, here’s an example of how this can look on your mobile.
