unity-design team mailing list archive

[Diego Moya <turingt@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi. I'm new to the list, but have been a Gnome user for more than 10 years
and Ubuntu user since 5.04. I did my part of usability work back at College,
and would like to contribute my humble knowledge and options to this
project.

I'd like to bring to your consideration an article that addresses the
problem of intrusive asynchronous notifications an provides an effective
solution: Growing Pop-ups.

"Reducing the Cost of Interruption Using Gradual Awareness Notifications"
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/lapis/projects/slowgrowth/slow-growth-technote.pdf
(short version)
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/slowgrowth/gradual-awareness.pdf
       (longer article)


You might want to explore this approach as part of your ongoing effort to
redesign the notification system.

The rational for gradual growing notifications is that it will only
interrupt the user's conscious flow at natural task breaks, when the user is
ready to process the notification. The article shows that this technique
produces a less intrusive  than pop-ups: in the experiment, users tended to
be interrupted by the notification mainly when finished typing words,
instead of while typing (as pop-up notifications did).

It has some advantages over other techniques for notification typically used
in the system tray:
- it doesn't depend on color, so it works for accessibility
- it is not a flashy but a subtle effect
- the growing speed can be used to signal the relative importance of the
notification (fast growing alerts take less time to be noticed).
- semantic zooming provides progressively more information: just icons when
the notification is small, more text as the panel grows.

I think this technique would combine well with the current approach of
ethereal notifications in NotifyOSD and for status changes in the panel
indicators. Maybe it could be used as well for interactive alerts and
dialogs raised by applications without focus. Might be worth exploring.

Diego


On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 6:48 AM, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>On 19/03/10 02:22, Dylan McCall wrote:
>> This begs the question: Why on Earth was the coloured wants-attention
> > icon dropped? Could indicator-messages differentiate the importance of
> > events and use a different icon accordingly? (For example, coloured
> > icon for actual messages, just lit up for when contacts log in).
>
>The spectrum of attention-grabbiness, if you want to think of it that
>way, is:
>
> - outline
> - dimmed
> - full mono
> - green
> - orange
> - red
>
>We don't flash :-)
>
>
>It's also true that we don't know exactly how it will work out. Elements
>of the panel, like the session menu, me menu, and the messaging menu,
>share subtle but interlinked relationships. Are you online? That's in
>the me menu. Has someone sent you a message because you're online?
>That's in the messaging menu. I can't pretend we are totally sure we
>know how the pieces will fit best, so we have to iterate and experiment.
>Perhaps someone knows where the tablets are that define the perfect
>solution, but I don't, so we are making a start, and evaluating as we go.