Is Notification Design Translation-Ready?¶
Type: Structure
Category: UI
Audience: Engineers and designers building email, in-app, or system notifications
🔍 What This Perspective Covers¶
Notifications aren’t copywriting.
They are structured communication with:
- Audience
- Timing
- Action intent
- Multilingual risks
⚠️ Typical Issues¶
- Hardcoded messages baked into backend or scripts
- Business terms untranslated or ambiguous
- HTML + plaintext emails generated differently
- No preview/test for multilingual rendering
✅ Notification Design Principles¶
- Design notifications as message objects—not ad hoc strings
- Separate content, logic, and delivery transport
- Include locale, audience, and fallback strategy in message contract
- Use keys and structured templates for translation compatibility
- Enable staging/testing flows for QA to verify wording and rendering
🧠 Principle¶
Message is a product—
it must be versioned, tested, and owned.
❓ FAQ¶
-
Q: Can devs write notification text directly?
A: Only if the team can preview and test it before sending. -
Q: Is translation the PM’s job?
A: Language is everyone’s responsibility once the product is global.