unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Apoorva Sharma <appi2012@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I went ahead and made a mockup of my "notification in the panel" idea,
> borrowing heavily from what android does. I've attached an animated gif
> showing a basic notification popping up.
>
> I want to make it clear that the entire panel does not fade out, but simply
> the indicator-menus and notification applet, and like notify-osd, fades out
> if the user brings the pointer over it, trying  This keeps all windows
> visible, and all panel icons visible.
>
> Another failure of the mockup is that the message indicator should light up
> after the notification.
>
> What do you think?


Looks really great to me, but on a lower level I think this is
stretching the current components pretty far.

I think it demonstrates a big pain point for the message indicator,
really. So, we get this nice, big message in the panel and then it
shrinks down to a menu item inside a little icon surrounded by other
little icons. Let's say there are a few different indicators lit up
for different reasons, too. There is lots of noise there, and the
message which was just given so much importance has been pressed into
a tiny corner.
We're forcing the user to hunt for something we were just dangling in
front of his or her eyes.

Here's what I love and respect about Android's arrangement:

 * Quick, momentary notification bubbles (like NotifyOSD provides) are
entirely their own thing and everyone agrees on that point.
 * Long-lasting notifications (of all sorts) are created under a
different interface and appear in the message tray. Again, very
specific kind of design. (What libnotify + notification-daemon should
have been). There's only one way these can be interacted with
(clicking them), but there are lots of possibilities for how they are
displayed.

For Android's title bar, consider that it doesn't hide messages behind
categories. If an application is saying something, Android assumes
it's of importance to the user and presents it very clearly.

So, that is a beautiful mockup and it's close to the first bit of
Android's nice title bar messages, but I think the rest is important,
too :)


Dylan