On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Isarra Yos zhorishna@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 Producthttp://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.