Re: Notifications

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

> On Feb 10, 2010, at 20:35, John Gregg wrote:
>
> > I agree that this is a good distinction, but I think even considering
> ambient notifications there is a question of how much interaction should be
> supported.  NotifyOSD, for example, does not allow the user to take any
> action in response to a notification.
>
> Being able to acknowledge an ambient notification could be an optional
> feature that isn't supported on Ubuntu as long as NotifyOSD doesn't support
> acknowledging notifications. (If it's a problem to make acknowledgement
> optional, I think making HTML notification optional is going to be a bigger
> problem...)
>
> FWIW, Microsoft explicitly says notifications must be ignorable and don't
> persist. "Notifications aren't modal and don't require user interaction, so
> users can freely ignore them." "In Windows Vista® and later, notifications
> are displayed for a fixed duration of 9 seconds."
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511497.aspx
> As such, it's always unsafe to design UI in a way that expects the users to
> be able to acknowledge a given notification.
>

FWIW, the mentioned document is full of examples of Notifications that have
text like "Click here to ..." on them. So Microsoft apparently
differentiates between "requires user dismissal" and "can be clicked for
furhter action".
Also, the absence of any hints that their notifications are actually
clickable makes them have this text everywhere, which is unfortunate, IMO.

Dmitry