---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <
erik@wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 1:44 AM
Subject: [Echo] Bubble notifications
To: WMF Editor Engagement Team <
ee@lists.wikimedia.org>
Echo team & designers,
Trevor recently made some improvements to MediaWiki's UI library for
generating simple on-wiki notification messages, in order to make the
system more useful for the Visual Edtior. This basic change [1] is now
live on en.wp and can be seen when you add a page to your watchlist --
where previously you got a big, centered message, you now get a bubble
notification in the top right corner that disappears after a while,
unless your mouse is over it.
Daniel Friesen, a volunteer, is currently working on improving this
system further into a more general notification message front-end. [2]
This change has not been merged yet. You can find a video of the
system in action here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Mw-notification.ogv
NB: This is purely a front-end, it doesn't know anything about the
notifications it displays.
Have the implications of this UI approach for Echo been considered
already? Specifically:
- Under what circumstances would a bubble notification be appropriate,
as opposed to the "just increment a number" approach? Right now
they're used for application messages ("You just added this article to
your watchlist"), not for service notifications ("The article Foo on
your watchlist has just been modified by User:Bar").
Different users likely have different preferences here (yay,
preferences), but I can see this type of real-time notification being
potentially very engaging and actually reducing the distraction
factor, compared with an increasing notification counter which forces
you to click on it to see what's going on.
- If we use this style of notification, how would we indicate the
connection between the bubble notification and the list of all
notifications to the user? Would we still increment a number?
Presumably yes, as the user may not be watching her browser tab while
it's displaying the notification. But then we'd have an odd mix of
application messages ("You have performed action X with result Y")
which don't increment the notification counter vs. service messages
which do.
- Is this design appropriate for touch devices (where we can't do the
mouseover detection to halt the timer), and if not, what changes would
make it more useful?
Some food for thought & considerations as we get further into echo,
Erik
[1]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/17605/
[2]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/19199/
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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