On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:41 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas <m...@canonical.com> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > 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. --- Thank you for the feedback, you raised some very good points. Evan _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
