Notion PRO: Reducing False Alarms — Liz Hassan

Notion PRO — Reducing False Alarms

About Notion

Notion is a do-it-yourself (DIY) home monitoring solution. Event notifications allow customers to stay on top of what’s happening at home, even when they’re not there. Notion’s paid professional monitoring service (Notion PRO) sends urgent alerts, group texts, and can dispatch local authorities on behalf of users; however, across all professionally monitored services in the market greater than 90% of escalations are false alarms.
Problem Statement

How might we reduce false alarms while still getting timely, professional help to PRO users when they need it?
TL;DR

With the iterations we’ve made from PRO v1 to PRO v2, customers are better educated on the features and their use cases, Notion is set up to monitor and review escalations in live time, and customer outreach is in place for users that log frequent escalations.

Background:

Notion is a do-it-yourself home monitoring solution in which users can customize what event types they want their sensors to log and Notion’s native mobile app notifies users when their door opens, their smoke alarm is sounding, their water heater is leaking, and more. Notion PRO is a 24/7 professional monitoring service that issues app alerts, sends text messages, makes phone calls, and automatically requests the assistance of the police or fire departments when Notion cannot reach their customer or the user verifies it is an emergent situation.

More than 90% of professionally monitored escalations are false alarms. Some sources cite this number as high as 98%. Wild, right?

Problem Statement:

How might we reduce false alarms while still getting timely, professional help to PRO users when they need it?

With up to 98% of professionally monitored events being false alarms, our goals were to:

educate the user on the scenarios in which they’d probably want to turn on/off a task for professional monitoring,
empower users to arm and disarm their system successfully, and
give users a fair opportunity to de-escalate an escalated event if they deemed no immediate help was needed.

Build and Learn: PRO v1:

Given time and resource constraints, we had to rely on the existing functionalities of the native mobile app, small adaptations to the Notion app interface, and the capabilities of our third-party security provider to navigate users through the escalation process.

Three-step escalation process:

Unlike competitors who primarily offer a one-step or two-step approach to escalations (typically some type of notification and/or a call), Notion PRO offers users a three-step escalation flow via different mediums in order to provide ample opportunity for users to respond to a professionally monitored event.

PRO v1 Escalation Flow

Differentiate PRO Notifications:

While daydreaming about critical alerts and rich push notifications, scope limited us to go to market with standard OS app notifications prefixed with “NotionPRO”.

App Alerts: Notification

Dynamic App UI:

Once the PRO customer tapped the notification, a dynamic card would open from the top of the Home screen with escalation information and options to see activity, escalate the event to local authorities, or de-escalate the event. If the user took no action, the rest of the escalation flow progresses via Notion’s third-party provider with a text and then a phone call.

App Alerts: In-app Escalation

UX/UI Challenges:

Missed Push Notifications:

Unsurprisingly, PRO users would often miss the PRO notification because it didn’t look or act different from any other notification you’d receive on your mobile device. The timely PRO alert got lost in the noise of all other notifications—not just from the Notion app (which is not insignificant), but also from other mobile apps.

Get disoriented in the app:

If and when PRO users did catch the push notification in time, they would often lose visibility to the escalation card as they navigated around the app. Given that this dynamic card was the only place users could take action in the app, they were more frequently responding to the text message despite already having a handle on what was going on.

Didn’t recall PIN number:

Industry standard in professional monitoring indicates that a preset, user-defined safe word or PIN is the way for users to respond to escalations; however, more frequently than we deemed acceptable, users couldn't recall what their set PIN was and, thus, couldn’t de-escalate events. Multi-user systems only exacerbated this problem.

Arm and Disarm Reminders

Critical/Urgent Alerts:

Come PRO v2, Notion’s PRO escalations had the optionality to be delivered with an audible sound via Critical Alerts (iOS)/Urgent Alerts (Android), which override do not disturb, focus mode, and the clutter of all other app notifications.

Save “Notion PRO” as a Contact

Full Screen Escalation Modal, Home Escalation Card

Additional Contacts and Group Texts:

In the new, task-oriented onboarding flow, users were prompted to set up additional contacts (e.g. a user already on their system or just a helpful neighbor) to help assess the escalated event. Additional contacts could also be added or removed at any time via the PRO settings menu in the app.

In PRO v1, secondary users would receive a separate/individual text and call, but PRO v2 brings users together in a group text to improve the communication between all parties.

Additional Contacts and Group Texts

One-Time Generated Pin:

To prevent any issue of a user failing to recall their preset, four-digit PIN, in PRO v2 Notion’s backend generates a one-time PIN to pass over to our third-party escalation provider to include in their de-escalation instructions. It’s similar to a verification codes you receive to log into apps or websites. Note: A further design iteration also includes this PIN in the full screen modal and persistent escalation card.

Save “Notion PRO” as a Contact

I’m not alone in my behavior of screening calls from unknown numbers (please leave a message when you’re ready to work with me!), so Notion prioritized the importance of having the phone number(s) saved in the users’ contacts. The “Notion PRO” contact was offered as part of the initial onboarding flow, but could also be saved from the PRO settings menu in the app.

Repeat, Build and Learn: PRO v2

I know we delivered precisely what we could deliver for PRO v1, but the user experience of our MVP was lacking and it kept me up at night. I knew we needed and could do more. I promise this is as dramatic as this case study gets.

Due to an acquisition by company whose risk tolerance was much lower than that of an ambitious startup, we had to switch our third-party security provider. This change required us to redesign and rebuild…A LOT, but it also gave us the time to thoughtfully address the user feedback we received and the narrative our analytics helped craft.

In PRO v2, our online education leveled way-the-heck up with a redesigned landing page and the augmentation of comprehensive PRO resource articles. And on the app side, I honestly couldn’t have been more proud to bring to life the optimizations we did with the team and time we had.

Arm/Disarm Reminders:

In an effort to further engage PRO users in arming their system when they are leaving their property and disarming when they are returning, the onboarding flow prompted iOS users to turn on Arm/Disarm Reminders. This feature leverages the geofence of a Notion system to send push notifications asking the user to arm or disarm as the exit or enter their geofence, respectively. Arm/Disarm reminders received glowing feedback and was a HUGE win coming out of Beta testing. We hope to bring it to our Android users soon, but geofence on Android is a bit more nuanced (further investigation is needed).

Instead of relying on the fickle display of the top-down escalation card, when customers tap on the PRO app alert in PRO v2 they are immediately served a full screen modal that commands attention and drives urgency to the timely event.

In the event the user does not have enough information to immediately escalate or de-escalate an event via the full screen modal, the team designed and developed a persistent PRO escalation card that follows users across app screens, helping to keep them oriented and focused while they investigate the matter further.

Critical Alerts (iOS)

Full Screen Alert Modal and Persistent Escalation Card:

Ongoing Insights:

PRO Dashboard:

Worked closely with my Product Owner and Data Scientist to build a comprehensive PRO dashboard to keep tabs on key PRO metrics in live time. We review these metrics collectively on a monthly cadence and craft user stories based on the data.

Customer Outreach:

Worked with Backend Engineers to set up a slack channel which logs each PRO escalation—when we see that a certain system has unusual escalation activity, we flag in live-time and assign a Notion Customer Success Representative to reach out directly to the user to understand their pain point(s) and educate the user on PRO escalation experience as needed.

Review Escalation Calls:

Our Product Team reviewed escalation data and listened in on recorded calls from our third-party escalation provider to dig into the user experience and help understand what was working and not working for our PRO users during a time of an escalation.

Ongoing Product Ideation:

Audible Bridge:

Notion is currently in the process of building a new bridge (think: system hub) that has sound capabilities. This will not only help Notion relay urgency, but also provide another medium for Notion to reach their PRO users.

Camera Development:

Video verification is an important way to help reduce false alarms. Notion is in the discovery phase of building their own camera and/or allowing the integration of third-party cameras.

Water Shut-off Valve:

While we do not request emergency services for leak or freeze events, Notion is in the discovery phase of integrating and/or building out a water shut-off valve to empower the user to mitigate potential water flow damage.