The notification bar has been sick for too long, Wandoujia invented a new medicine

The notification bar on a mobile phone is like an inbox. The current situation is that the proportion of spam in it is likely to overwhelm the normal emails. This is a disease. Both iPhone and Android phones have prescribed a remedy: set a level for users to decide whether to grant the app permission to send notifications.

This prescription works, especially for those who are independent-minded, know what they want, and are willing to spend time tinkering with their phones.

They divide the apps installed on mobile phones into two categories: one is important and trustworthy, which are allowed to send notifications; the other is not so important and not completely trustworthy, which are prohibited from sending notifications. As you can imagine, trustworthy apps are rare, and the vast majority of apps are ruthlessly put into the cold palace.

However, just like people are not black and white, simply and crudely classifying apps into black and white categories, although it meets the needs of people with information obsession, is not a truly rational solution. For example, the mobile clients of e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com will send notifications of product promotions and recommendations, as well as logistics dynamics and instant messaging notifications.

For some users, the latter two are important, while the former two are unnecessary. It is not possible to completely ban them, and it is not realistic to expect Taobao and JD.com to actively reduce noise. What should we do?

Wandoujia has found a new solution - managing notifications based on the content of the notifications, rather than on an app-by-app basis. "It sounds like an obvious solution, and we don't know why no one has tried it before," said Wang Junyu, CEO of Wandoujia, at a small media communication meeting on April 7.

On this day, Wandoujia released the official version 1.0 of the tool app "Wandoujia Notification Cleaner". "It can intelligently collect those unimportant notifications, returning the notification bar to its original state and making it truly usable." Product manager Xu Bin took the stage to share the working principle and design concept of this product.

He said that "Wandoujia Notification Cleaning" draws on the principle of Gmail's anti-spam: Google uses a sample library to determine the probability that a new email is spam, and the self-learning ability of the sample library makes it more and more accurate. Compared with the content of the email, the text content of the notification is relatively small. Wandoujia also adds metadata unique to the notification to describe a notification, and then automatically classifies the notifications according to similarity.

According to Xu Bin's sharing, "Wandoujia Notification Cleanup" now divides notifications into 21 types, including promotions, information, recommendations, etc. During the beta testing phase of the product, 100% of the promotional information was cleaned up, while traffic and to-do information were all retained.

Sometimes the same type of notification content from the same app may have different importance for different people. Therefore, Wandoujia Notification Cleaner does not completely rely on automatic judgment by machines, but also provides user-defined functions.

Xu Bin told Leifeng.com that during the beta test, only 10% of users manually adjusted the rules, which was far lower than their expectations. This indirectly shows that the working principle of the product, that is, the background technology, has been verified and affirmed.

How to turn technology into simple and elegant design has always been what Wandoujia is most willing to spend time on and what they are best at. They also spent enough time thinking about the product design for this seemingly simple product: they tried at least 4 different design versions of "Wandoujia Notification Cleaner" until the final version was simple enough to get the pass for online launch.

"If users can forget about us when using us, it means we are really useful." Product manager Xu Bin introduced the design concept of this product. He emphasized that Wandoujia is not trying to replace the notification bar, but to return the notification bar to its original usable state; it is not to clear unimportant information, but to store it in another interface; it is not to embellish useful information, but to leave it where it should be.

Several media colleagues who participated in the communication meeting agreed that "Wandoujia Notification Cleaner" is a good product for Android users, but they don't quite understand what greater commercial value it has that is worth Wandoujia's investment. Wang Junyu said that they believe that user value will always have the opportunity to be transformed into commercial value. There are hundreds of millions of Android users in China, and even if only 1% like this product, it is still a large number of users.

This is a typical "Wandoujia Style", which can be seen from the independent apps they have developed in recent years: Wandoujia Overview, Wandoujia Smart Lock Screen, Kaiyan... Each one has a simple and elegant design, and it is not easy to see the business logic of each one.

In fact, as for Wandoujia Notification Cleaner, Wang Junyu believes that there is an important concept or judgment about the future behind this tool-type product: the notification bar will become more and more important, and even become the main way people use their mobile phones. Many heavyweight overseas technology media, including Wired magazine, have analyzed why the notification center will become the main interactive interface of smartphones.

"It took four people one and a half months to make Wandoujia Notification Cleaner," Wang Junyu said in response to a reporter's question about why he made this product. "First, there is a gap in the market, and our execution and product capabilities are good enough. Second, we have a way to minimize the cost of trying, which includes not only the cost of research and development, but also the understanding of internal information of different applications that Wandoujia has accumulated over the years. Why not bet on something we don't know?"