Designing for iOS 15 Focus

Apple's latest version of its iPhone operating system, iOS 15, has a new Focus feature. It's being lauded as one of the more significant features in this year's release — You Should Definitely Use iOS 15's New, Distraction-Squashing 'Focus' Mode — and is one of the changes that could impact many existing apps.

In a nutshell, Focus allows people to set a personal status that will filter notifications for different activities or times of the day. Apple has a pre-set list of Focus types including Work, Personal, Sleep, Driving, Fitness, Gaming, Mindfulness, Reading and also offers people the option to create their own custom version.

How will this affect your app?

If your app provides push notifications, there are ways you can improve your app experience by defining the types of notifications it will deliver.

At the top-level Apple now splits notifications into two categories: communication notifications, which includes phone calls and messages, and non-communication notifications, which includes everything else.

Non-communication notifications are further broken down into several types that will affect how Focus will work:

Passive - Information people can view at their leisure, like a restaurant recommendation.

Active (the default) - Information people might appreciate knowing about when it arrives, like a score update for their favourite sports team.

Time Sensitive - Information that directly impacts the user and requires their immediate attention, like an account security issue or a package delivery.

Critical - Urgent information that demands immediate attention, such as personal health and public safety alerts. Note that you must get an entitlement from Apple to use Critical interruptions.

The first step to designing for Focus is to define the type of your notifications. The second step is to make sure you're not abusing it; Time Sensitive and Critical notifications should be just that. Don't use them for content that isn't important, or it will lead to people turning all your app notifications off. Apple defines Time Sensitive as "happening now or will happen within an hour", and suggest that Critical notifications are "extremely rare and typically come from governmental and public agencies or healthcare apps."

It's worth noting that the first time your app triggers a Time Sensitive notification, the device will let people turn them off for your app, so it's important to seize this opportunity. One way to do this is to ensure that the title of the notification contains high-value information. If no title is given, your app name will be used. I'd suggest this is of little value to the recipient.

Given the Focus feature is intended to minimise distraction, it's also worth ensuring you're not sending too many Time Sensitive notifications. This may be difficult to restrict, as it will depend on the notifications you are sending, but it’s worth auditing. In some situations, you might be able to replace a recent notification with a more recent notification if it's related, rather than send an entirely new message entirely (see developer detail for apns-collapse-id).

All up, now is a great time to revisit your app's use of notifications. By doing a simple audit and working out what types of notifications your app delivers, you should be able to determine how it will work with Focus. At the same time, you can potentially improve the app’s total experience.