unity-design team mailing list archive

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:41 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> Evan Huus wrote on 03/12/11 15:43:
>> ...
>>
>> Currently when an event occurs (for example, someone says something
>> in a minimized empathy chat), a notification pops up and the
>> messaging indicator turns blue. They happen at the same time, but
>> the events don't appear related. Technically they are two
>> components of the same event, but they appear on two different, not
>> visibly related UI elements as two separate events. This is made
>> even worse if the notification is delayed because it is queued
>> behind other notifications. In that case the indicator turns blue
>> well before the notification appears, so the user has no idea which
>> notification the blue indicator is associated with.
>>
>> Additionally, the change of colour in the indicator is not
>> particularly noticeable. Anecdotally I have found that people
>> either don't notice it at all, or ignore it because they don't know
>> what it means (was there a usability study on this? I remember one,
>> but couldn't find it any more...)
>
>
> Yes. From
> <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2011-April/032988.html>:
> "Only 2/6 noticed an XChat Gnome notification, despite (1) a
> notification bubble appearing, (2) the Ubuntu button going blue, (3)
> the messaging menu envelope going blue, and (4) an emblem appearing on
> XChat Gnome's launcher."

Yes, that was the one I was thinking of. Thank you for finding it!

> (In 11.10, fewer things change: the Ubuntu button no longer goes blue.)
>
>> That's the problem. There are a couple of possible solutions, but
>> here's one that makes the most sense to me:
>>
>> - Link notifications to indicators via a speech-bubble-like tail.
>> Volume change notifications get linked to the sound indicator,
>> empathy notifications get linked to the messaging indicator, etc.
>>
>> I believe that just this change on its own will help
>> significantly. Notifications are transient, so people can't
>> interact with them, but with this change the notifications are at
>> least *pointing* to something interactive. They still don't require
>> interaction (which was one of the original design goals I agree
>> with) but they make it obvious how. This should reduce the
>> frustration felt by users who are used to interacting with
>> notifications directly on other operating systems.
>
>
> Three problems there.
>
> Most importantly, in the 11.04 test, people didn't see the bubble
> either. Would a bubble with a tail be much more noticable than one
> without a tail?

My apologies for being unclear - I don't think a tail will help make
the bubble more noticeable. That wasn't one of the problems I was
trying to solve with the tails.

[tangent] One option to make the bubbles more noticeable (tail or no)
would be to increase the contrast. The transparency is nice, but the
fact that it's always a 'black' transparency makes the notifications
hard to see over dark backgrounds and dark window contents. Didn't the
11.10 dash have a similar problem? [/tangent]

> Second, giving Ubuntu notification bubbles tails would make them look
> more like Windows notification balloons ... which are clickable. :-)

Yes, that's true :/

The fade-on-mouseover effect should make it fairly obvious that they
aren't clickable though, and the tail should lead the eye to the
indicator which *is* clickable. This is definitely an area for
concern, but I'd be interested to see how much of a problem it really
is in testing. I imagine most people wouldn't have too much trouble
with it, but maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

> Third, what would happen when there were two or more bubbles on screen
> at once? Would the tail of the second obscure the first?

I almost never see multiple notifications on my system, so I never
thought of this case.

One solution would be:
- the notifications are ordered such that the top-most has the
right-most associated indicator
- the top-most notification has the tail on the top of the bubble
- all lower notifications have the tail on the left side of the
bubble, angled so as not to overlap
- multiple notifications from one indicator would chain together so
that an indicator never has more than one tail.

This solution has a few problems though:
- we give up the chronologically ordered notifications
- for people with really short names (or who don't have the session
and clock indicators running for some reason) the top-most
notification bubble may be wide enough to obscure any reasonable path
to the indicator for subsequent notifications.

Simply displaying one-at-a-time may be safer. Urgent notifications
(such as critical-battery-low) would override all existing
notifications.

Purely anecdotally, I rarely see multiple parallel notifications, so
serializing them would work fine for me. I don't know how problematic
this would be in the general case.

>> ...
>>
>> I personally think the above change would be sufficient, but we
>> have other options as well:
>>
>> - Add a glow effect and a *very* gentle pulse to active (blue)
>> indicators. This will make them slightly more obvious and
>> interactive-looking than currently. We'll have to be careful not
>> to make them too distracting, though.
>>
>> - Change the notification animation to be a magic-lamp like expand
>> and collapse into the appropriate indicator. Could be used instead
>> of or in addition to the speech-bubble-tail. I expect this would
>> end up being too active/busy, but you never know.
>>
>> ...
>
>
> Perhaps when battery is critically low, the battery icon should blink
> constantly even once you've dismissed the warning alert.

That would probably be good. Critical alerts like that should have
free reign to be as loud/distracting as they want for as long as their
importance warrants.

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Thank you for the feedback, you raised some very good points.

Evan