Chromium Blog: Introducing quieter permission UI for notifications

Chromium Blog

News and developments from the open source browser project

Introducing quieter permission UI for notifications

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Notifications on the web enable users to receive important updates even when they are not interacting with a website. Notifications are an essential capability for a wide range of applications including messaging, calendars, email clients, ride sharing, social media and delivery services. Unfortunately, notifications are also a common complaint as many websites request the notification permission on first visit rather than at contextually relevant moments in the user’s journey. Unsolicited permission requests interrupt the user’s workflow and result in a bad user experience. To protect notifications as a useful service for users, Chrome 80 will show, under certain conditions, a new, quieter notification permission UI that reduces the interruptiveness of notification permission requests. In Chrome 80, users will be able to opt-in to the new UI manually in Settings. In addition, the quieter UI will be automatically enabled for users under two conditions: first, for users who typically block notification permission requests and second, on sites with very low opt in rates. The automated enrollment will be enabled gradually after the Chrome 80 release while we gather user and developer feedback. Later in 2020 we plan to enable additional enforcement against abusive websites using web notifications for ads, malware or deceptive purposes. This enforcement will be described in detail in a future blog post.
Quiet UI overview

Quieter UI (Desktop and Mobile)
The quieter UI is available in both Desktop and Mobile. The first time the UI is presented to the user, it will be accompanied by a dismissable in-product help dialog that explains the new feature. Enrollment & opt out Users can be enrolled in the quieter UI in three ways. Manual enrollment (and opt-out)

Manually enroll on Desktop or Mobile via Notifications Settings
Users can enroll for quieter prompts manually, or disable it completely. To enroll, the toggle ‘Sites can ask to send notifications’ must be enabled in Settings > Site Settings > Notifications, then the checkbox ‘Use quieter messaging’ must be checked. Automatic enrollment for users who infrequently accept notifications Users who repeatedly deny notifications across websites will be automatically enrolled in the quieter notifications UI. Automatic enrollment on sites with low permission acceptance rates Sites with very low acceptance rates will be automatically enrolled in quieter prompts. They will be unenrolled once acceptance rates improve, for example, if the developer of the site improves the notification permission request user experience. Per-site information about notification permission acceptance rates will be made available via the Chrome User Experience Report in Q1 2020 and automatic enrollment is based on Chrome usage statistics. Developer recommendations First, we recommend that web developers test their site’s permission request flow with the quieter notification permission UI, by enabling it manually in chrome://settings/content/notifications. At the time of writing, the feature is being rolled out gradually to Canary, Dev, and Beta channels, and can be force-enabled in chrome://flags/#quiet-notification-prompts in Chrome 80 and later. Second, we recommend that developers follow best practices for requesting the notification permission from users. Websites that ask users to sign up for web notifications when they first arrive often have very low accept rates. Instead, we recommend that websites wait until users understand the context and see benefit in receiving notifications before prompting for the permission. Some websites display a pre-prompt in the content area before triggering the native permission prompt. This approach is also not recommended if it interrupts the user journey: sites that request the permission at contextually relevant moments enjoy lower bounce and higher conversion rates. For help with user permission UX, you can refer to this 5 minute video on improving your user permission acceptance rates, and read about best practices when requesting permissions.
Posted by PJ McLachlan, Product Manager