Cross-posting ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 1:44 AM Subject: [Echo] Bubble notifications To: WMF Editor Engagement Team <ee(a)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 _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design

I think we need to make the distinction between notifications and confirmations (similar to what Steven was saying) and make sure the UI affordances make sense. Confirmations are in response to what you as a user did. Watchlist and post edit feedback are types of confirmations. Notifications are in response to what someone else did that involves you. My personal opinion is that we should use bubble-type for notifications very sparingly and judiciously. For confirmations, they make a lot of sense. Re: Growl: the user has opted to install the app, giving permission for this type of notification. Howie On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Vibha Bamba <vbamba(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design