Amplitude Cross-Product Notifications

In Q3 of 2022, Amplitude started uniting the experience between all of its products (Analytics, Experiment, Audiences, and Data). As a designer for the Collaboration pillar, our vision was to be “the wrapper around our product,” focusing on how users work with each other across all of Amplitude.

I started with stakeholder interviews with all the cross-pillar product teams to understand their collaboration needs. There was a lot of interest in streamlining workflow handoffs between different user personas and between our products. For example, when an analyst realized data was wrong in a chart (in Analytics), they could notify an engineer who could fix the instrumentation (in Data), who in turn could notify the analyst when the fix was done.

The problem with this was that our system, which sent notifications via in-app, email, and Slack, was antiquated, buggy, and built only on (and for) Amplitude Analytics. Experiment, Audiences, and Data reached users only via email. A brief look into the data told us that the open rate of emails was only 9.6% with 0.5% of users returning to Amplitude. Anecdotally, we also heard feedback from users that they “don’t use email.”

Our goal here was to implement a new notification platform that would support all our products so we could notify users on things that mattered to them via channels they actually used (not email).