Abstract

The growth of social media has impacted on people’s everyday life, precipitating the development of a new set of guidelines for designing applications (apps), creating heightened user engagement without crossing the line to frustration. This study focuses on how push notifications from social media apps should be designed in order to keep the user intrigued and returning to the app, without annoying the user to the point where they turn the push notifications off. The exponential growth in the usage of social media has emphasised the importance of designing apps with a user- centred functionality. The study used a combination of a survey questionnaire and a qualitative perception study, with the results collected as both data and extracts from interviews. This study identified that a high frequency of notifications from social media apps has led to resentment by users against pushes notifications in general. The app-user relationship is cemented from the beginning of the experience and the action the user takes in relation to notifications depends on their perception of the senders’ intentions. Younger users’ actions are also predominately driven by the phenomena Fear of Missing Out.

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