unity-design team mailing list archive

[Diego Moya <turingt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 16 September 2010 17:19, Conscious User wrote:

>
> > A notification appears (the mouse cursor is not below the notification).
> > The user is now notified. When they move their mouse to that area (bear
> > in mind that they are 'notified' and have no further use for the
> > graphic) it once again fades away and reappears when the cursor departs.
> > This, irritatingly hangs around for about 5 seconds.
> >
> > I know! I am notified! Why are you hanging about cluttering my screen?
>
> Because hovering your mouse over the notification does not necessarily
> mean that you have already read it. It could also mean that what you
> wanted to click on was more urgent than reading the notification or
> that you were already in the process of going there to click something
> and didn't want to stop (or simply couldn't stop, as a lot of actions
> we do in the desktop are repetitive and become automatic and lightning
> quick after a while).
>

I thought the current OSD design was based on the idea that it doesn't
matter if you miss one notification. ;-)  So what would be wrong if the
notification was simply discarded in that case? It collided with a much more
important action, so it's only natural that it would yield priority.



>
> At least for me, both of those cases are not rare.
>
>
Then, that's a big problem with the design.



> Believe me, I'm the first in line to complain that NotifyOSD is *far*
> from being perfect, but as you can see it is not exactly trivial to
> come up with fixes that do not cause other, significative, problems.
> There are a lot of different cases to consider.
>
>
IMHO much of those problems are due to the NotifyOSD giving itself too much
airs. If it truly accepted its role of being secondary to everything else,
and just disappeared when it's unwanted,  it would be a lot less intrusive.

Actually there's a really simple fix that would solve both your problem and
the one of obscuring graphical applications, and it's this: don't ever show
a notification while the user is working on something else. The way to
detect the user work must be heuristic, but there are some good clues to it:

- never show the notification while the user is actively providing input.
Typing, moving the cursor, drag gestures.
- After heavy user actions (pressing keys, clicking) wait at leas 5 seconds
before showing a notification.
- If the user is working at a fast pace and the notification remains hidden
for this reason for longer than its useful lifetime, simply discard it
forever.

These small additions would prevent a notification getting in the way. In
these cases the user wouldn't have noticed or wanted to read it anyway, so
nothing of value is lost.