The Facebook approach is nice. The number they show initially varies with screen resolution and their scrolling and lazy loading work well.
Most of it would be relatively easy to copy, although I suspect a lot of testing (or a lot of bug reports) have gone into correctly guessing the number of elements to show based on screen size.
The best thing imho about their approach is that they react to all page visits, and very clearly show a bold notification for a notification sent after you visited that page and a more subtle version for a notification that you have already seen the triggering change for.
That's how they solve the feeling of being overwhelmed by notifications. It keeps the new number down and means that a new notification should only refer to a change you have not seen.
Sadly most people (including us) compromise and show notifications as "new" if you have not seen the notification before, and clear their new status before you click through rather than maintaining the relationship between trigger and notification to give a more accurate version of "new".
The Quora compromise on the same UI feature is different but silly. They keep notifications marked new until you manually clear them. I rarely use Quora and have a completely useless readout that tells me I have 200 new notifications.
Unfortunately I think adding "untriggers" alongside all the notification triggers is significant work, so it should remain a potential future enhancement.
Luke Welling
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 9:13 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 5:44 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
Both Antoine (hashar) and Reedy have mentioned that they want the
ability to
remove individual notices after they are read (or clear all read notifications) from the flyout.
One thing I'm wondering about is whether the high number of notifs that are immediately displayed when you click may be contributing to that - the feeling of being overwhelmed by old notifs + desire to make some disappear. FB/web has a pretty sophisticated approach:
- On first click you have a smaller window of notifications (4-5).
- Once you attempt to scroll the notifs list expands vertically to
accommodate a longer list. 3) Scrolling supports dynamic loading of additional notifs for roughly a week's of backlog (which seems to be identical to what's available in "See all").
-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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