unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

We're very interested in morphing windows, so thank you for exploring
the idea! In general, morphing windows should let us deliver "simpler,
clearer" user experiences, because people are confronted with just the
specific information they need at any given time, and don't get lots of
popup windows as that changes through the course of a workflow.

If we thought there was a compelling use case for actions on
notifications, your suggestion would be a very useful one!

The reasons that we think actions on notifications are a bad idea have
been documented elsewhere, I'll just focus on one of them which is the
poor interaction between the short-lived nature of a notification and
the need to "reach it" to interact with it. Allowing actions on
notifications means that people HAVE to rush to get to them before they
expire. We view that as broken by design, so we won't have any actions
on notifications, and that in turn means there's no need for this.

However, I think the basic idea of ensuring that any intellectual
framework for morphing is applied to notifications is sound.
Notifications do change, they have always had the "replace" ability
where a notification can be replaced by a newer one, for example when
the status of something changes twice quickly. We added the idea of
appending to the system with notify-osd, and quite a few apps are
starting to take advantage of it too. In both cases, the notification
display bubble needs to change size or shape, and the experience, the
"feel" of that should be guided by what we learn in morphing
explorations, generally.

Make sense?

Mark

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