On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Well, both, really, but this thread was more about the
emails and general
options than what the specific options were, far as I can tell.
But I guess if I had an actual point, why are the options so specific? It
seems like there should only be so many discrete types of notifications,
nevermind what the notifications themselves are - perhaps something along
the lines of edits, log actions, messages, personal notices, frivolous
personal notices, general notices - some will wind up on the talkpage
equivalent, some in the watchlist equivalent, but while that particular
detail is flow territory, that is still what the user will see - and the
user will expect the preferences to correspond to what they see. So if
personal notices like block, userrights, etc would need to go on the
talkpage equivalent since folks might need to respond to them, they should
have a preference governing personal notices that would cover all of those
(and another for the more frivolous ones, but obviously worded better).
Currently looking at the notifications preferences on mww, they are very
specific, and that kind of specificity should not be necessary, nor does it
scale well. According to the above grouping, for instance, these currently
appear to be two message types and some minor personal notices, so why not
just lump them as such or similar? Then folks could have fairly
straight-forward options to cover everything without it being too
cluttered, and it would be much more intuitive to boot once we have the
feeds in place as well.
Regardless of the particular notification (I agree with what Matt and
Oliver are saying about the importance of permissions changes), Isarra is
100% right that need to focus on simplicity when it comes to the
preferences, and strongly consider sacrificing more fine-grained control
for the sake of clarity, scaling, and easy of use.
A relevant bit of reading is "Checkboxes That Kill Your
Product<http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill>"
-- the former head of UX on Firefox on convoluted and opaque preferences
that accumulate over the years. For an example of best practices: iOS
notifications are pretty strict about not letting you specify which
individual notifications you can get from an app, only the method and
volume of notifications for that app. This scales well across the thousands
of different applications. I believe Android 4.2+ behaves the same way as
well.
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/