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:
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 Mar 5, 2013, at 5:51 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
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