What’s New in Chrome 80 for Developers

Web notifications enable your users to stay in touch with the latest updates even when they are not directly interacting with your website. Notifications are useful and cover a wide range of services including text messaging, ride scheduling, booking appointments, etc. On the other hand, notifications have also become interruptive and websites ask for permission to display notifications at first glance rather than making it contextually relevant to user experience. By displaying irrelevant notifications, the user gets interrupted and this ends up as a bad user experience. Hence, Google introduced quieter permissions UI. Let’s discuss how it works in the coming sections.

To overcome this situation and preserve the nature of notifications as a service, Chrome 80 has introduced its latest chrome update, Quieter Permission UI for notifications.

Users can opt for manual enrollment from the Settings menu. Additionally, there is also a provision for automatic enrollment. Under automatic enrollment, users who block all site notifications and sites with very low acceptance rates will be added automatically into quieter UI notifications. 

Additional enforcement against abusive websites pushing web ads, malware content, or such stuff are also likely to be rolled out later in 2020. It is available in both Mobile and Desktop and designed with a help facility that explains all the features to the user.

Getting Enrolled and Opting Out

There are three ways in which you can get enrolled in the quieter notifications :

You can manually enroll yourself in this feature or disable it completely. To enroll, enable the toggle “Sites can ask to send notifications“ in Settings > Site Settings > Notifications, and then tick the checkbox ‘Use quieter messaging’.

Some users reject website notifications and such users are auto-enrolled. Similarly, there are sites with very low opt-in rates and such sites are also automatically enrolled. For any site to get unenrolled, the acceptance rates must increase for the websites. This rate can be checked at the Chrome User Experience Report.

Websites asking for sign up immediately as soon as the user lands have low acceptance rates. It is better to understand the situation and then trigger options to receive notifications before prompting for permission. It is seen that websites that follow this practice see lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates.

5 Tips for Improving User Acceptance Permission Rates

Developers should keep in mind the customer and implement only those practices that improve their overall experience.

• Only ask for access you need from the user.
• Be clear and specific about what you need and why that is needed in advance of prompting.
• Prompt at a contextually relevant moment in the user’s journey to enable a smooth experience.
• Degrade gracefully, if a user ignores or blocks a permission request, make sure your experience still works.
• When a blocked or ignored permission request is needed to use a feature of the app or web, make it obvious to your users, however, refrain from getting in the way of other features that don’t need permission to work.

Conclusion

Chrome 80, through its latest chrome update, is empowering users to have more control over how notifications display on the web as well as their apps. As a developer, it is important to make the user experience as smooth as possible when implementing such initiatives while providing customer service.

We, at TechAffinity, are known for focusing on user experience and providing rich UI/UX services. For further queries, you can reach us by dropping a mail at media@techaffinity.com or you can schedule a meeting.