What is our primary use case?
My team has been using OneSignal as a trial a few months ago.
We are trying OneSignal because we have some education programs with one of our partners, so we were thinking about maintaining a mail list. When we have new content created, we automatically send information to them. That's where we were trying to explore such products in the market, and this is when we met OneSignal.
Whenever we create something, we build a notification pipeline, and for a registered email list, we can send the message to them.
I tried the email list features of OneSignal; that was the thing that attracted us.
We were trying to trigger the automated message to the user's email by some integration with OneSignal. For example, in our education campaign, when the user submits a survey after they finish a course, we would expect that some message would automatically be triggered and sent to their email.
What is most valuable?
We were trying a few solutions in the market to see which one would assist us, and this is a very useful feature. Especially, the email content and template are supposed to be managed by the product designer rather than the engineers. We want to reduce the work effort for their integration effort.
If we adapt to it, this is definitely a very useful tool because we can save at least two to three weeks of engineer effort in designing such features, such as the automated email. It also provides the dashboard for the product owners to design the message templates. That would be super helpful.
What needs improvement?
For the product itself, I would say it's well-structured, but eventually, we didn't go for it because the engineering team suggested that we can use AI to automatically create such features. Even as a product designer, I was not too much engaged in that process anymore because they used an AI-generated message to send to the mail list, and the feature was also assisted. So that's why eventually we went with in-house solutions rather than adopting OneSignal.
To be honest, our company would not consider using a third party for this feature anymore. But when it specifically comes to OneSignal, I would suggest adding some AI-assisted message generation features. I'm not sure if recently they have such features or not. The point is that we don't want to always stick with static messages sent to different users. We are expecting that sometimes, if you want to engage users more, the message sent to a specific user would be hooked up with the context of their history, their condition, their profile, and highly dynamic and optimized by their personal information. All these things can be assembled together, possibly assisted by AI, to make it even better and more vivid.
Because I haven't found any special features from this platform, as there are other similar platforms online for such features. The gap from making it even better is what I just mentioned. Maybe we can have an AI-drafted message to adapt more to the user's specific case rather than a general message.
I haven't found any AI-related features from this platform, but maybe I'm wrong and they added it recently; however, I didn't find it.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been working as a Product Owner and UI Designer for almost ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
When I was using OneSignal, I didn't find any problem. But I have no idea about the situation when scaling it out, because when we were using it, we were in the POC phase. I can't comment on scale-out situations.
During the POC, if there's not too much concurrency, I would say the service itself is stable. But I can't comment on the case of scaling out.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
When I was using OneSignal, I didn't find any problem. But I have no idea about the situation when scaling it out, because when we were using it, we were in the POC phase. I can't comment on scale-out situations.
During the POC, if there's not too much concurrency, I would say the service itself is stable. But I can't comment on the case of scaling out.
How are customer service and support?
I haven't had the experience of contacting OneSignal's support team. We were just reading the documents as engineers.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Our engineering team was trying to directly use AWS SNS service to build a solution by themselves.
As I mentioned, AWS SNS was the previous solution we considered.
What other advice do I have?
If your organization does not have a quick solution for managing a mail list or push notifications, this service is definitely worth a try. It can save you engineering effort. I would rate this product a seven out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.