This commonly used feature became a research project between myself and the Information Architect on the team when we realized that no one in the department fully understood Notifications in their entirety. The engineers understood how to connect them from the event management queue to the UI, the designers understood how notifications were displayed in the UI.
But what exactly was triggering these toast messages being shown to the users? Where did they originate? What elevated them from a simple data point to something that a user cared about? We needed to learn these answers to these in order to create a Notifications Management tool.
Through multiple interviews with team members from different business units, we identified a core set of requirements for a notification to be a Notification within the system:
ASSOCIATED INFO
CONTENT
This quickly became one of those proverbial threads that was pulled on. Notifications touched so many other objects in the system – which device created the initial data point, what thresholds were met to classify it as an "event", did it need to be associated to a work order? Did these types of events happen periodically and who needed to be notified of them, that would be handled with a Notification Subscription, which also needed to be specced out.
I created an IA diagram to understand all of the relationships and objects that were presenting themselves weekly. This became my most complex IA diagram to date and once it had gone through multiple iterations and grown in size, I was paid a much appreciated compliment from my IA teammate who said, “I'm just waiting for you to realize you're really an Information Architect, not just a designer.”
This was a new facet of design that I hadn’t realized was a skill. Always something new to learn.