NOTIFICATIONS: notifications remaining at the top of the screen is annoying for users

BeccaMelhuish commented 3 months ago

In tests, 3 users have expressed irritation at the fact that the notifications/error messages etc stay at the top of the screen until you close them. They find it annoying to have to keep clicking the X all the time.

I've also noticed in tests that users don't always close them, so they stay 'hanging' there. And then they sometimes notice them later when they're actually no longer relevant.

@kevincrepin What could be done about this? We could make them vanish on their own after a certain amount of time? But then if they didn't notice them in time, or didn't read it in time, they could have missed something important.

Maybe they could appear as popping in and out of the activity feed somehow, and all notifications are included in the AF (as well as activity updates). So they would see that if they didn't get time to finish reading one then they can find it there? But then that may also cause frustration or bigger UX issues (potentially missing important things), so I'm not sure..

Maybe at least all the less important ones like "Invites sent!" etc, could fade after a set amount of time, but the important ones (like errors) you have to close? But again, not sure about this as then they wouldn't have the habit of closing them all, and therefore more likely to leave some hanging.

Not sure how fixable this is myself, but hopefully @kevincrepin has better ideas :)

BeccaMelhuish commented 2 months ago

@ilmartyrk @ssin1901 moved to 'soon'

kevincrepin commented 2 months ago

I think there are 2 options here.

First option is to do it like you say, @BeccaMelhuish , with a difference in importance in the notifications and how they behave accordingly:

Important ones (errors, warnings) stay on the screen and need to be closed to dismiss
more "fleeting ones" (like success messages) could disappear after a short time by themselves.

Second option (which could work in conjunction with the first) is to have settings for this where the user can granularly make a difference (or not) about which notifications stay on screen until interacted with.

@BeccaMelhuish do you remember by any chance what those 3 notifications were? Were they errors or success messages? If we do it so that success messages disappear by themselves maybe that's already a big part of the frustration we can eliminate?

BeccaMelhuish commented 2 months ago

@kevincrepin I don't remember unfortunately if it was more success or error ones that prompted the comments, but it was more that 3 different users mentioned this as a general point, rather than in response to 3 notifications in particular :)

I'm thinking this could be one that we don't change in live until we've user tested enough in the test environment though, just in case it causes some unforeseen issues - so I've added the 'UX test pre live' label.

@kevincrepin for the success ones, how long do you think they should stay on the screen before they disappear?

citizenos / citizenos-fe

NOTIFICATIONS: notifications remaining at the top of the screen is annoying for users #1547