Behind the story

When I first came to the US to pursue a Master’s degree, my friends and I were looking for on-campus jobs in the first semester. We had already experienced many cultural shocks and were very new to the job search process here. We approached almost every supervisor at each store, gave them our names, and came back. Eventually, we discovered that there is a space for UNCC freshmen where new job positions are posted by supervisors.

To our surprise, when we joined, there were 937 students in that group. There was one message about an opening from the supervisor, and then everyone started a message that said, “I'm interested”. My notification box was flooded all the time. There was a time when I was having a conversation with my friends, and they expressed the same frustration about the notifications flooding in all the time. Every time they ignored checking, it turned out to be from the space manager. The thing is, they recruit on an FCFS basis, and if we miss one important message, we could miss an opportunity.

Another friend from the group told us that she set an option to be notified only if she is mentioned or for the first message of every new topic. However, she was still flooded with many messages and unfortunately ignored a message about an opening from the space manager. This highlighted the need for refined notification options within the Google Spaces platform to enhance the user experience.