Thanks for all your good insights about this proposed feature, which we had planned to tackle after the first release.

I find Facebook's approach to be pretty intuitive. It seems to be working well for people I know, and I have never heard anyone complain about it.

With Echo, we also limit the number of notifications shown in the flyout based on your screen size, and support limited scrolling up to about 10 notifications. After that, you are encouraged to go to the 'All notifications' page, where you can find at least a week's worth of notifications (we currently support an infinite number of notifications on that archive page, but may have to cut back to a month's worth or so).

Currently, we highlight new notifications in the flyout, so it's easy to tell them apart from old notifications, which seems effective. We then un-hilight them after you have viewed the flyout, which is also consistent with Facebook's approach. An argument could be made that perhaps we should only un-hilight that notification if you have actually clicked on it, but I believe we can wait on this until we have done a usability study.

Since we are already using an 'X' button to dismiss notification types which you don't want to see anymore, it would be awkward to add on additional functionality to that button for dismissing just that particular notification, because it would clutter the user interface.

So a 'Mark all as read' button might be a more effective way to address requests like Antoine's, as described in this proposed feature:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Mark_all_as_read

Though I would argue that the current UI provides a practical solution by automatically un-highlighting notifications you have seen in the flyout, as well as limiting the number of notifications in that flyout.

Either way, I recommend that we wait on this feature until after the first release on Enwiki, which will generate a lot of user feedback which may provide more insights from our community. 

I do not support the second suggestion to enable viewing all notifications in the flyout, which would seem highly impractical to me. That's what the "All-notification" page is for, and it's only a click away.

My 2 cents,

Fabrice

On Mar 6, 2013, at 8:47 AM, Luke Welling WMF wrote:

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:

1) On first click you have a smaller window of notifications (4-5).
2) 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

Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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On Mar 5, 2013, at 5:51 PM, Steven Walling 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.

This I definitely agree with. You see this pattern in notifications in several contexts (Android ICS has it, Quora, FB I think?). 

 

I'm not sure this is a great idea. If someone really wants to focus on viewing and responding to all unread notifications, asking them to go to a queue of it is likely the simplest and best UX choice IMO. 

-- 

Steven Walling

https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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