Why do you need Contextual Notifications?

At Oroson, we believe context switching is bad for productivity. We are always looking at ways to help users focus on one task at a time, without getting bogged down in a stream of notifications. Reducing context switching through asynchronous communication is one of the primary drivers to use Oroson. Our latest platform release adds some improvements in this area.

Before Contextual Notifications, unread notifications were a stream of messages based on a timestamp. Other real-time communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams work in this way, but this causes several issues. Consider this example:

Jane is a CTO for a software company. She provides oversight on numerous ongoing projects. She often needs to block out time to go ‘off the grid’ to do strategic work, which requires focus and time to think. Throughout the day, multiple users are communicating on the projects which Jane is overseeing. At the end of the day, when Jane comes back online, she needs to quickly see what she has missed and whether there are issues with any projects. 

The old way – Prior to Contextual Notifications, it was much harder for Jane to consume unread notifications when using a stream of notifications based on time. Multiple conversations and content updates occur simultaneously within projects. This leads to a long stream of updates which is very hard to follow. The longer she leaves them, the more difficult it is to track what has changed. 

The new way – With Contextual Notifications, Jane can list all the unread notifications by Board and Item, and see all the updates grouped together. This allows her to move through each item and review the updates. She can then respond to issues or leave comments, at her own pace.

In order to make the Workspace, Board and Item activity views as consumable as possible we improved the UX with the following changes:

Below is an example of the new activity feed for a Board:

We have added a new view in the Workspace settings to allow users to see a full log of all the activity in a Workspace. This view shows unread activity and can be filtered by Board to provide more context.

All these changes are currently available on the desktop version of Oroson. We plan to implement similar changes on the Android and IOS versions soon.

We hope you like the new features. Any feedback or suggestions can be sent to feedback@oroson.co. 

Thanks,

Richard Davidson, Oroson Chief Technical Officer.

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