Detail Connect
July 2026
Designing Reliable SMS Notifications for Critical Booking Updates
Overview
Detail Connect is a SaaS CRM platform that helps mobile auto detailers manage bookings, customers, scheduling, invoicing, payments, and day-to-day business operations.
Mobile auto detailers rely on timely booking updates to manage appointments and respond quickly to clients. Missing a booking request or schedule update can disrupt daily operations and impact the client experience.
To make critical booking updates more reliable, I designed the end-to-end SMS notification experience, including phone verification, notification preferences, and recovery flows. The feature focused on keeping setup simple while giving detailers control over which booking events they received through SMS.
The Problem:
Detailers could miss important booking updates when relying only on in-app notifications.
The Goal:
Design a reliable SMS notification experience that ensured important booking updates were delivered while giving detailers control over their notification preferences.
Users:
Mobile auto detailers.
My Contribution:
End-to-end UX/UI design, interaction design, prototyping, developer handoff preparation, implementation review.
Challenge
My challenge was to integrate SMS notifications into the existing notification experience without making notification management more complicated. The workflow needed to allow detailers to enable SMS notifications, verify their phone number, manage notification preferences, and recover from common verification scenarios while remaining familiar and easy to complete.
The experience also needed to support:
SMS notification setup
Phone number verification
Notification preferences
Verification error states
Updating an existing phone number
while keeping the experience clear and consistent with the existing notification settings.
Understanding the Context:
SMS notifications extended an existing notification system rather than introducing a standalone feature. Before designing, I needed to understand how the current notification settings worked, how phone verification was already introduced during onboarding, and where SMS preferences could be introduced without disrupting the existing experience.
This understanding helped ensure the feature felt like a natural extension of the notification system instead of a separate workflow.
Solution
Key Design Decisions
Giving detailers control:
Rather than automatically enabling every notification, I designed a dedicated SMS settings section where detailers could enable text notifications and choose which booking events they wanted to receive.
Design Impact:
Providing notification preferences allowed detailers to receive important booking updates while keeping the experience flexible and easy to manage.
Building a familiar verification experience:
Enabling SMS notifications required phone number verification before the feature became available. I designed a straightforward verification flow that guided users through entering their phone number, verifying it with a code, and returning them to the notification settings once setup was complete. The verification step followed the same pattern as the existing phone sign-up flow, creating a familiar experience for users.
Design Impact:
Breaking verification into clear steps reduces friction while helping users complete setup with confidence.
Designing Reliable Recovery Flows
Phone verification isn't always completed successfully on the first attempt. Rather than focusing only on the ideal path, I designed recovery flows that helped users resolve common verification issues without restarting the setup process.
Design Impact:
Supporting recovery scenarios helped users complete verification independently while reducing interruptions during setup.
End-to-End Experience
The final experience guided detailers from enabling SMS notifications through verification and notification preferences, ensuring important booking updates could be delivered reliably.
Outcome
The Text (SMS) Notifications feature was successfully implemented as part of the Detail Connect application.
What shipped:
SMS notification preferences
Phone number verification
OTP verification flow
SMS notification settings
Verification error states
SMS booking notifications
Result
Approximately 5% of detailers have enabled SMS notifications since the feature was released.
