Notification panel design: what 44 SaaS bells open on day one

By Screenrove editorial · 24 October 2026

We clicked the bell in 44 SaaS apps on new accounts: 35 were empty and 4 held product news. The tabs, filters and empty copy that new users see first.

Notification designs are usually drawn full: avatars, mentions, unread dots. The first time a real person clicks the bell, it is almost always empty. We opened the notification surface in 44 SaaS products on new research accounts, and 35 had nothing in them. Four held only a welcome note from the vendor, four were filled with product news or promotions, and one, Shortcut, showed a feed of our own actions.

That first, empty look is the one every new user gets, so it is worth designing. Below: what the bell opens (a popover, a panel or a page), the tabs and controls inside, the bells that double as a news channel, and what the empty state says. Many of these screens are also on the empty states wall.

Popover, panel or page

The bigger the surface, the more it expects you to sort. Tabs appear in 7 of the 17 panels but only 2 of the 16 popovers. Pages turn into inboxes: Plane, folk, Wrike and Superthread use two panes, a list on the left and the selected notification on the right (“No notification selected” in Plane).

Tabs split “for me” from “everything”

The most common reason for tabs is to separate what is addressed to you from what you merely follow. Jira and Postman call it Direct and Watching; monday.com uses All, Mentioned and Assigned to me; Shortcut, Plane and Medium have a Mentions or Responses tab.

monday.com packs the most into its panel: three tabs, a search field (“Search notifications by people, boards, and more…”), an Unread only toggle, a settings cog and an empty state that ends in a button.

Two products use tabs as triage states rather than types. Fibery’s Inbox has Do Today, Later and Done; Wrike’s has Incoming, Sent and Archive. Superthread builds the same idea into the default view, which hides anything you have dealt with.

When the bell is a news channel

Four products put something other than notifications behind the bell. DeepL’s opens “Product updates”: three blog posts and a “View on blog” link. OpusClip’s bell opens “News” with four feature announcements, each with a red unread dot. Any.do’s opens “News & Tips”, with cards for connecting agents and following it on Instagram.

Clockify goes furthest. Its bell carries an orange badge of 2, and the two items are invitations to more notifications: get them in Pumble (“by CAKE.com”, the card says), or sign up for a monthly newsletter.

Others keep news apart. Shortcut has separate News and Activity buttons in its top bar, Canny has a megaphone for its changelog beside the bell, and Netlify puts a dated News menu, with incident reports and changelog posts, behind its own megaphone. Two panels also sell a channel in their footer: Postman’s “Get notified on Slack”, and a “Get notifications in MS Teams” banner on monday.com, which we closed before capturing.

What the empty panel says

Of the 35 empty surfaces, 11 use inbox-zero wording, on accounts created for this research: “You’re all caught up” (Postman, with a 🥳, tldraw, Medium, Toggl, ToolJet, fal), “All caught up!” (Wakelet), “All clear” (Lucidchart, folk, Smartsheet) and “You’re up to date!” (Codecademy). Smartsheet’s version thanks you for work you have not done yet: “You’ve taken care of all of your notifications. Take a break.”

Ten are more useful, because they say what will arrive and who causes it. monday.com and Mixpanel name mentions and replies, folk says “when someone @tags you in a note or a task”, Plane “Updates for your subscribed work items”, Superlist “Tasks assigned to you, comments, completed tasks and everything else”. On a day-one account, that sentence is the only explanation of what the bell is for.

The panels with a vendor welcome are a reminder that the first notification is a design choice too. Ideogram sends “Get to know your free plan”, Taskade three unread onboarding notices, Wrike a bot message plus three tip cards. Dribbble’s bell leads to its Analytics page, with the single welcome notification in a column beside an “Unlock Analytics with Pro” upsell.

What to steal

• Design the empty state first. Most new users will see it before any notification. Say what will appear and whose action puts it there, as monday.com and folk do.
• Save “all caught up” for people who caught up. On a new account, “Nothing yet” is truer.
• Offer the action that fills it. monday.com’s Invite new members is the only empty panel here with one.
• Split Direct from Watching once there is enough volume to need tabs; a popover with one list is fine until then.
• Keep news out of the bell, or label it. If the badge counts promotions, people learn to ignore it. A separate megaphone (Canny, Netlify) or an honest title (DeepL) avoids that.
• Pick a model for done. Read and unread, resolved (Superthread) or triage tabs (Fibery): any of them works if the panel says which.

How we counted

We captured one notification surface per product, opened from the bell or an Inbox or Updates entry, in desktop browsers with research accounts in October 2026. Most accounts had one member, so no teammate could mention us; that is why so many are empty, and it is also what a new user sees. Notification settings pages, audit logs, task inboxes and chat inboxes are not counted. Container types, tabs and controls come from the notes recorded at capture, sorted by hand and checked against the screenshots we quote. A populated panel may show controls we did not see.

To see these side by side, browse the cleared empty states or connect the Screenrove MCP server and ask your agent for “notification panels with Direct and Watching tabs”.