Summary notification: Tell the story

[1fish2]

The summary notification currently just lists notification titles, without key info like match results and upcoming match times. It's not so helpful.

Redesign it to summarize the story of your followed teams & events: event advancement, district advancement, and awards, OR summarize what changed for them since you last looked. E.g. wins, losses, ranking points, alliance selections, and next match. Prioritize subscribed teams, then subscribed events, then followed (subscribed and favorited) teams, then followed events.

Example:

    Team 254 won 2 more qualification matches for +8 RPs, played a surrogate match, and currently ranks 14 but is actually #2 in RPs/match. Their next match is Q43 at 11:50.

Example:

    _Team 971 won all 8 qualification matches, seeding #3 with 28 RPs (just 1 RP behind first seed), led alliance _#2 with teams 368 and 3303, and made it to the Finals.

[nwalters512]

I don't know to what extent the summary notification was ever meant to be explicitly helpful. It's more of a "stuff changed, go to the notification list for details" message. While notifications with detailed summaries of team performance might be useful to augment existing notifications, I don't believe they should replace the existing catch-all that's shown when there are more than one pending notifications.

A few reasons why:

• When a user says "give me notifications for X", we then have a contract with the user to provide those notifications. Not just information that may be derived from or inferred from those subscriptions, but the notifications themselves.
• Notifications, when possible, should be useful and actionable by themselves. Admittedly, if you have 15 pending notifications, the summary isn't very useful. But I'd argue the better solution is not to try to cram information from 15 potentially disparate notifications into one summary, but rather to treat the summary as a jumping-off point from which the user can view the full notification list and drill down from there.
• What if a team has subscriptions for 25 teams? How do you attempt to show all that information in one notification? I'd rather put that in an in-app dashboard and leave the notification as a "stuff has changed" message. Maybe give the user the option to subscribe to periodic performance updates that would appear as separate notifications.
• In my mind, there would be a disconnect if tapping a notification talking about the performance of two favorited teams brought me to the notifications list; that's not really a logical flow to me.

TL;DR don't replace the current summary, but augment it with additional features as we work towards a more glanceable, personal TBA.

Android N's bundled notifications should at least make the existing summary notification more useful: it will let us expand the summary to show all of the notifications comprising the summary that would have been shown individually.

[1fish2]

I see. That makes sense although the design is more implementation-centered than usage-centered.

The current situation:

• I find each individual notification extremely useful and sufficient. I rarely tap through into the app. (Except I now realize that quals match score notifications should include RP scores since the high order bit is seeding progress.)
• But if I don't swipe it away before the next notification arrives, it'll turn into a summary notification that feels spammy. It doesn't reveal match results or upcoming match times. Tapping on it goes to the Recent Notifications list which doesn't look like the notifications, doesn't indicate which ones are new, doesn't boldify my followed team numbers, and is not compact. It takes more effort to decode it. (It's my fault for refining the notification text without refining the recent notification view.)

I'd like a summary notification to summarize the point of those individual notifications rather than just listing their count and types. You shouldn't feel rushed to dismiss a notification before it turns into a summary.

Ideas:

• +1 for supporting Android N bundled notifications. This will be perfect for those of us with Nexus phones. Alas, the Platform Versions dashboard says only 4.6% of devices are yet up to Android M, so adoption may take a while.
• Make each Inbox-style list entry each say its main point, e.g. the match result's RPs, or scores, or at least win/loss. (Does it have to fit on one line?)
• Multiple upcoming-match notifications for a field should simplify down to the latest one. Earlier ones are obsolete.
• Maybe simplify a long list of match-score notifications down to their RP total or W-L-T total per subscribed team. If this takes one line per relevant team, only do it when that's shorter than the number of matches. OTOH, this clashes with bundled notifications and their tap-through.
• Make the summary title summarize the activity rather than count the number of GCMs.
• Redesign the Recent Notifications list to look more like the notifications themselves and be easier to understand. Visually distinguish new notifications from the ones you've seen (seen in the list or as individual/drill-down notification drawer entries).
• Getting notifications for 25 teams would be spammy, but I agree that following that many teams would best be handled by a dashboard. Presumably the dashboard would show an activity summary for each of those 25 teams rather than an intermixed list of recent-notification cards.

[phil-lopreiato]

A few points...

• Our version distribution is much more skewed towards newer android versions than the average. This means we can rely a little more heavily on upcoming Android features (like N notifications)
• I like the smarter summaries where we simplify the match results down to a record/RP/whatever metric for the game
• We should implement a few more gcm features. Mainly, make upcoming match notifications have a TTL so they expire in 15 minutes if not received.
• Maybe we can put an unread badge in the notification drawer and clearly delineate which notifications are new with a horizontal rule or something

[nwalters512]

I find each individual notification extremely useful and sufficient. I rarely tap through into the app.

Agreed completely. That's why I'm excited to exploit N's bundled notifications.

But if I don't swipe it away before the next notification arrives, it'll turn into a summary notification that feels spammy. It doesn't reveal match results or upcoming match times.

See above.

Tapping on it goes to the Recent Notifications list which doesn't look like the notifications, doesn't indicate which ones are new, doesn't boldify my followed team numbers, and is not compact. It takes more effort to decode it. (It's my fault for refining the notification text without refining the recent notification view.)

We could definitely do more to make the Recents list more useful. Indicating new notifications and bolding teams are great ideas; the latter should be part of our wider effort to indicate favorited entities. The notification cards could admittedly be more compact; they use the recommended dimension from the Material Design card spec, but we could shrink some padding and font sizes to increase the information density and fit more content onscreen. That being said, they weren't designed to look like what you'd find in the notification shade. System notifications are typically text-only; we tried to present a richer view in the in-app notifications. It would be useful to do user testing to see if they prefer text-only notifications or what we currently use in the Recents screen.

Make each Inbox-style list entry each say its main point, e.g. the match result's RPs, or scores, or at least win/loss. (Does it have to fit on one line?)

We could definitely do this; showing more details for the 2-3 most recent notifications instead of 7 lines simply listing what types of notifications are new would be a much better use of the summary notification. The Inbox-style notification allows "lines" to wrap onto multiple lines; see how Slack combines notifications from the same channel into one notification.

Make the summary title summarize the activity rather than count the number of GCMs.

Notification titles do have to fit on one line; that only gives us about 30-35 characters to work with. I don't know how much useful information we could fit in that.

Redesign the Recent Notifications list to look more like the notifications themselves and be easier to understand. Visually distinguish new notifications from the ones you've seen (seen in the list or as individual/drill-down notification drawer entries).

See above for my thoughts on this. Does that mean you're in favor of replacing things like the match info "table" with a text-only entry? Do we continue to treat the Firebase tickers like a list of notifications (render them with the same styling and info as Recents), or do we differentiate between them?

Maybe we can put an unread badge in the notification drawer and clearly delineate which notifications are new with a horizontal rule or something

This is a great idea, I'm not sure why we aren't already doing this.

[1fish2]

Does that mean you're in favor of replacing things like the match info "table" with a text-only entry?

I'm in favor of whatever design best fits the design goals. To propose design goals:

1. Be easy (and quick) to understand.
   • I've noticed that some ways of displaying the notification are much easier and quicker to read and grok. This might be a Thinking, Fast and Slow thing, which is bimodal.
   • We could usability-test some alternatives by showing mockups, timing how long it takes people to read them, and asking a question to test comprehension.
2. If Recent Notifications is to serve as the history + details of notification-drawer messages (I didn't realize that until you explained it, but it makes a lot of sense), then the two representations should align well. Recent Notifications could be an enriched representation but it probably shouldn't be an entirely different representation.
3. Handle accumulated notifications in whatever way users most appreciate. Discard upcoming-match notifications older than 15 minutes? Only ones that are subsumed by match-score notifications? Summarize match-score notifications in the notification area with totals? Only when it can't use Android N's bundled notifications?
   • We could show uses some mockups and ask for feedback, although people don't always know what they want.
4. Make Recent Notifications more compact to fit more on screen and so it's less intimidating to scroll through. It needn't use Cards.

Do we continue to treat the Firebase tickers like a list of notifications (render them with the same styling and info as Recents), or do we differentiate between them?

I think they should look the same unless there's a usage-centered reason to make users learn another representation.

[1fish2]

Our version distribution is much more skewed towards newer android versions than the average. This means we can rely a little more heavily on upcoming Android features (like N notifications)

Excellent. (In comparison, my little BBQ Timer app has only 16.6% on Android 6.0, while the average for the Tools category is 6.1%.)

I like the smarter summaries where we simplify the match results down to a record/RP/whatever metric for the game

Yes. I imagine the user's main goal for this is quickly determining, "How are my teams are doing?" and "When should I tune in to which field?" If y'all imagine other main goals, let's list them.

Mainly, make upcoming match notifications have a TTL so they expire in 15 minutes if not received.

Excellent idea!

Maybe we can put an unread badge in the notification drawer and clearly delineate which notifications are new with a horizontal rule or something

Excellent idea!

[nwalters512]

I think those design goals sound like a great way to evaluate both the current design and any potential changes.