In-app notifications

Transient messages that are displayed within an application. Differentiated from info bars and regular notifications because:

  1. They are time-specific rather than view-specific.
  2. They are used to notify the user about something that is only meaningful or useful within the context of the application.

Goals

  • Be noticeable.
  • Try not to get in the way.
  • Allow an action to be included in the notification.
  • Don't interfere with regular notifications.
  • Compatible with sidebars, full-screen mode and tabs.

Non-goals

  • Notification history.
  • Handle many notifications sent at the same time.
  • In-app notifications are not the same as regular notifications, and shouldn't be connected to them.

Relevant Art

Android - Toasts

http://developer.android.com/images/toast.png

Material Design

Snack bars - https://material.io/design/components/snackbars.html

Gmail

https://docs.moodle.org/dev/images_dev/6/6c/gmail-undo-example.png

Google Inbox shows a similar notification in the bottom-left of the page.

GNOME

in-app-notification.png

Discussion

Is "in-application notification" a confusing name? Perhaps it would be better to differentiate from notifications more generally. Other possible names: "information bubble", "message pop up".

Allow apps to determine the placement?

Tentative Design

This is a extremely tentative re-design:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/raw/master/in-app-notifications/in-app-notifications.png

The main goal of this is to make in-app notifications be simple to consume by developers and be consistent for users. This means having a simple notification-like API with which the developer can fire off simple messages.

Some details are particularly tentative, including:

  • the exact positioning of the notifications
  • the queuing and discard behaviour (the implementation could be much simpler than what's described in the mockup)

An older version of this design can be found here.

See Also

Comments

Design/OS/InAppNotifications (last edited 2019-08-06 14:02:38 by AllanDay)