Notifications: uselessness of

[Milosz Derezynski]

>
> Really, when there is
> no *functional and behavioural* difference, they are effectively the
> same thing.
>

I disagree. This is a too phenomenological take on this. There is a semantic
difference
because the user knows it. I am absolutely confident that if you would do
proper usability
testing on this, making people first aware of the semantic difference
between a dialog
and a notification bubble (to a big enough extent, which would probably go
beyond
the time scope of such a test, but almost everyone using Ubuntu probably
very well knows
the semantic distinction between notification bubbles and dialogs,
especially long time
Linux users), and then testing with them of what they think is a dialog and
what is a notification bubble
(of course artificial befuddlement of the user is not a good thing to do
because you want this
test to succeed for real-life purposes, so I find your example of "what if
they looked the same"
pretty distracting off the course, because no one would make up dialogs so
that they look
like notifications).

That said my point is that with a notification, users, I think, or at least
a good part of them, will know
that the popup does not *require* their attention and an action button
inside it does not NEED to be clicked,
differently so than with a dialog.

I also from time to time get notifications on Ubunut that have an action
button for seemingly important stuff
but the notification just disappears after a while, I think it happened for
me with something related to the network
configuration.

The thing is, it's in the first place not the notification system that
should be overhauled, or actions removed from
notifications, but the apps or subsystems should be fixed so that actions
that basically *require* user interaction
are presented in a different form than in a notification.

Right now it's not clear to me if this was your original primary goal. Sure
your new notification system will have this
as a sideeffect, since if there are no actions within notifications possible
anymore, then the relevant apps or subsystems
will have to take care of displaying them in a different way to the user:
but in my opinion, the primary goal should
be to fix these apps, e.g. have network-manager or whatever does this
display a proper, possibly even desktop-modal,
although that would be rather harsh, but could be useful, dialog to the
user, instead of offering the option to configure
the network from the notification bubble; I think the *intent* was that the
user "can" open the network configuration
from there right away if (s)he wants it, but if (s)he "doesn't" she always
"can just go to the network preferences and do it there".
OK, but, who told the user that she can do so once the popup goes away?
That's a real semantic messup there in the desktop
itself, it's got nothing to do with notifications in the first place.

Regards,
M.

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