Breakout Session: Notifications and UX Design in Android O

So the UX team started with research by going on a UXpedition.  They went to NYC for 3 weeks - talked to users, observed them, interviewed them, etc.  A few major insights:

• Biggest use case is to keep notifications that users don't care about from happening
• Notifications from people (either generated by a message, email, etc.) are more important than those that are just from apps
• Lot of noise from apps and not an intuitive way to either a) manage settings for them and b) group/organize the actual notifications

So to address these issues Channels (a way for apps to group notifications and set up settings for each channel) was developed in Android O.  This groups similar notifications from an app into a 'Channel'.  You can access settings for these directly from the notification shade by long-pressing the notification.  This also allows for all apps to have some consistency with how they manage settings for notifications.  I believe it's on the app developer to decide what the channels are and which notification types each channel includes.  Here's how the settings use-case is handled without Channels (current implementation in Android N) and with Channels (new in Android O):

Android O extends the base functionality that was rolled out in N.  Here are the research insights:

Visual hierarchy of the notifications and why they're set up this way:

Here's the breakout of each category and why and comparison to Android N:

Major Ongoing category:

People to People - missed the first slide that has the details about what these are:

General - no behavior or visual changes.  In O though a lot of these general are now being set as BTW.

By the Way (BTW):

Here's the comparison of an example of the same apps/notifications for each category (N is on the left, O is on the right):

Snoozing feature - people need to remember things they need to do.  Today we can only dismiss (or leave it in shade but now it has a risk of being lost).  If you partial swipe you get two icons, one of them is the gear (settings) which already exists in O and the other is a clock to snooze.  You can adjust by tapping the downward arrow.