unity-design team mailing list archive

[Diego Moya <turingt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 17 September 2010 09:03, Conscious User wrote:

> To be more clear, I think this goal is *already* being achieved quite
> nicely by NotifyOSD *when mouse interaction is involved*. The problem
> is when one of the two following cases happen:
>
> a) The user is typing something in a text field right behind the
> bubble. Your heuristic works in this case, but it's a little bit of
> an overkill. I certainly don't mind receiving notifications
> when I'm writing something completely far away from the bubble area.
>

Maybe the heuristic can be refined to not block notifications while typing
unless in that case. But then you get the second problem also while
writing...


> b) The user wants to just read something covered by the bubble. This
> is more difficult for your heuristic to cover because he might not be
> actually interacting at that moment. In fact, in the case of long
> texts he might not be interacting for several seconds.
>
> I actually support having a quick way to close a notification. I don't
think it's the traditional 'X' icon, though, but something more radical:
hide the notification if the mouse hovers it, and *don't show it again even
if the mouse moves away*. The notification should act as a real bubble,
disappearing on touch.

As I said, the user moving the mouse over the notifiacion region means that
the content was more important at that moment than the notice, so there's no
problem in closing it. The information in it should be already in the panels
anyway; the user has already taken notice that there existed a bubble, and
can go to the appropriate menu to read it.

Combined with my heuristic, there's no problem that an involuntary mouse
movement would close the bubble before the user notices it.