Hwi Lee
Hwi Lee

Leaning into iterations

Fixing abusive web notifications, and generalizing the UI framework for web permissions

Permission request in a popover dialog (original)
Quiet UI (interim to fix the notification permission, and investigate generalized solutions)
Chip UI (latest iteration for generalization) Note: Added for context only. I only guided this iteration.

Problem

Web users are spammed by prompts especially the one that asks to accept notifications from websites. The users and the web ecosystem suffer from abusive notifications by malicious websites. How might we keep out unwanted and spammy notification behaviors while supporting meaningful uses?

Solutions

The solutions were not obvious at the beginning. Throughout the course of exploration and experiments, the team — consisting of engineers, data scientists, UX writers, product managers, designers, and various reviewers — expanded the solution space beyond the UI treatments, and devised layers of mechanism to respond to contextual characteristics.

  • Levels of UI loudness

  • User level adaptation

  • Crowd deny

  • Enforcement program

  • Public data and comms

Silent UI when likely unwanted
Quiet UI when ambiguous
Loud UI when the user wants
Contextual messaging 1 — Discourage with warning
Contextual messaging 2 — Inform with crowd trends
Contextual messaging 3 — Guess, and ask for correction
  • Introducing quieter permission UI for notifications, Jan 2020

  • Protecting Chrome users from abusive notifications, May 2020

  • Reducing abusive notification content, Oct 2020

  • Paper, Usenix accepted — “Shhh...be quiet!” Reducing the Unwanted Interruptions of Notification Permission Prompts on Chrome by Bilogrevic et. al. 2021

My contributions

I led the design from its inception. Throughout the development, I drove investigation, iterations, and designs for experiments, which resulted in public launches on Win, Linux, Mac, Chrome OS, and Android.

First-run of the quiet notification on Desktop (rigth) and Android (left)

In parallel, I also guided the generalization of this UI for broader web permissions, which can be tested with chrome://flags/#permission-chip enabled on Chrome.

Send Hwi Lee a reply about this page
More from Hwi Lee
Back to profile