New and Improved Task Subscription Notifications

When we revamped our notifications system we aimed to reduce notifications just to the important stuff. Flow was so full of information that it was hard to distinguish what was important and what was noise. Subscription notifications were often followed by comment notifications, and they felt quite duplicative. Often you’d get a message that you’ve been subscribed to a new task, followed quickly by a comment notification on that task- this felt too noisy, and we ended up cutting the feature.

After we removed this however, we noticed that whenever there wasn’t a comment on a task we’d miss tasks that were getting created. It’s an interesting Catch 22- In one scenario Flow was being too noisy, and in the other people were missing out on important information.

Now when you create a Task in Flow, we’ll ask you whether or not you’d like to notify your subscribers of the new task. If you know you’re going to be adding a comment in short order, or simply don’t want to start a conversation yet- you can hold off on notifying people. If however you’d like to give everyone a heads up about the task, you can opt to send them a task notification upon task creation.

So what about when people are subscribed to a task after it’s created? Well, we’ve found that that’s usually that’s when you’d like someone to take a look at the task- so we’ll always send a subscription notification to people that are added to a task after it’s created.

Subscriptions are one of the most powerful features in Flow, and after putting this update through its paces internally we can truly say that we feel like we don’t miss a beat. Enjoy!