Goals
- Provide User Notifications when books become available for loan
- Provide user notifications when borrowed books are about to expire.
Background and strategic fit
Strategic alignment goal to improve user ratings and grow adoption
Assumptions
Requirements
Provide user notification support in SimplyE for iOS and Android regardless of vendor content provider limitations.
| # | Title | User Story | Importance | Notes |
|---|
| 1 | SIMPLY-192 | As a user I want to get a notification when my reserved books are available for download. | Must Have | - Vendor Notification Systems: Email push notifications from vendors can hijack the user or confuse them. Vendors push notifications from their systems through email. However, they do not provide subscription services for machine based API access to queued change events or notification queues which SimplyE can reliably integrate from vendor to vendor. These independent systems allow the vendor to manage the user experience by drawing users into their app through email notifications and potentially confusing the user.
- Security and Privacy: Vendors such as Overdrive require a users security credentials in order to access the their holds and loans. This creates a challenge for SimplyE in that storing such information is against is principle privacy and security design and is not consistent across vendors. Therefore, SimplyE client initiated queries against a patron distributor bookshelf. This requires SimplyE to use a client initiated notification strategy vs a server based push notification strategy.
Polling Based Notifications
Because the Circulation Manager is polling providers bookshelf only when prompted by the user, the mobile app can provide polling based notifications by asking the cric manager for an update of the users bookshelf on a regular basis. This server side strategy is due to the fact that the users ide and pin are required for access the service providers API in exchange for a temp token. Because SimplyE servers do not store a user’s service provider credentials, updates are user initiated from their client application. In other words, the users privacy and security is in their possession, not the libraries. While this may not allow Push based notifications it does enable near real time notifications based on the client's ability to initiate updates in the background while the user is “in” the app.
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| 2 | SIMPLY-193 | As a user I want to know when my borrowed ebooks are about to expire | Must Have | I'm getting a "this issue can't be viewed message for this story, so will create a new one." |
| 3 | SIMPLY-1059 | As a PATRON I want to see how many days left to check out a reserved book that has become available. | Must Have | Display date reservation checkout grace period expires for a book that is available to check out. |
| 4 | SIMPLY-195 | As a user I want to opt into notifications | Must Have | |
| 5 | SIMPLY-196 | As a user I want to select / subscribe to certain notifications | Must Have | |
| 6 | SIMPLY-197 | As a user I want to configure how my app notifies me. | Must Have | |
User interaction and design
- Patron sees notifications
Questions
Below is a list of questions to be addressed as a result of this requirements document:
Not Doing
