unity-design team mailing list archive

[Diego Moya <turingt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 17 September 2010 14:18, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> Diego Moya wrote on 17/09/10 07:10:
> > I think it was Jef Raskin who said that you should treat user input as
> > sacred. I concur, and that can be extended to the user focus of
> > attention.
>
> Well, Jef had some odd ideas about user input and focus of attention. He
> thought, for example, that error messages should behave rather like
> Notify OSD bubbles, undismissable and gradually fading, but that there
> should be a keyboard command to adjust their transparency ("The humane
> interface", pp116-117 <http://ur1.ca/1nklv>). And he thought it would
> make sense to insert incoming e-mail messages into whatever document you
> were editing at the time (p176 <http://ur1.ca/1nkq9>).
>
> Yes, those bubbles are actually quite similar to what NotifyOSD tries to
do. But look how Jef required a way for the user to take control of how
bubbles are presented. He also thought that "a document that stores all
messages for later retrieval is essential". The Ayatana notification design
took the original idea and then changed it to its opposite by removing every
safeguard feature to put user in control and keep it humane.

The current design for OSD notifications is heavily modal - it blocks access
to the visible area until the bubble disappears, and it doesn't give the
user a way to claim that blocked area. The provided workaround to reach the
blocked screen area requires a complex interaction (the repeated fading out
and in as the mouse moves away) that can be quite distracting and doesn't
work if the user needs the cursor elsewhere. That's why I support a way to
interact directly with the notification, either by pricking the bubble or
allowing the user to place it somewhere else. Turning the bubble into an
object by allowing direct manipulation would make it not blocking, and thus
non modal.


As for the curious mail receptions in Jef's book, this was for a system
where the whole stored information was a few strokes away through instant
search, so moving it to an archive would be as trivial as cut-n-paste. Also
have in mind that this design was probably tested on the Canon Cat, in an
era way before the Eternal September and spam.


> If the notification is important enough to interrupt the user flow then
> > a transient bubble notification is not the place for it, it should
> > create a persistent warning in the panel.
> >...
>
> Persistent warning, yes. In the panel, usually not. :-)
> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines>
>
> Ok, I was thinking of applications that log their notifications to the
information menus.