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Toasts are bad UX

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Re: Toasts are bad UX

#241

Post by zachrip »

iambateman wrote: post #67
zachrip wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say as someone with a limited visual field, toasts are very frustrating as they're almost always out of my field of view. Please keep indicators/notifications close to the thing that caused it.

Serious question…when saving a document on a mac, the only visual indicator that the save happened is the red “close” button loses an interior circle. This is 10x more subtle than any toast. Do you wish that were different? Or does that work for you?

Do you have a video or screenshot of this? I don't daily drive a mac so I'm having trouble recalling (I also am not sure what you mean by saving a document, in which context?). But regardless, I don't think a toast would serve me better there, that doesn't mean that ux doesn't suck either :)

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#242

Post by DidYaWipe »

lolinder wrote: post #46

I'm not convinced. Most of the argument seems to be that redundant UX is bad UX: > But by archiving the email, the email disappears from the list, which already implies the action was successful. > In this example, the button already includes a confirmation so the toast is entirely unnecessary. I vehemently disagree with the idea that just because you're already communicating something one way it's bad UX to include…

You missed the main point, which is that the "toast" is nowhere near where you're looking when performing the action.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#243

Post by DidYaWipe »

nativeit wrote: post #180
adamc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're bad. Messages that are on the periphery of my vision/attention (imagine a widescreen monitor) are actively confusing. I'm working on THIS problem here and something flashes up over there. Half the time, as I refocus to read this annoying intrusion, it disappears. It's bad UX. Put your damned messages where my attention has already been directed to BY YOUR UI .

The inevitable tradeoff here is having a somewhat standardized location for notifications versus allowing them to appear arbitrarily determined by the developer’s notion of where they are ostensibly drawing your attention. Maybe that’s worthwhile, but I think there are going to be a lot of cases where the ideal location is ambiguous, or where devs have an idea for where your attention will be that’s not always correc…

It's not standardized. And putting notifications on or right next to a control you're INTERACTING WITH is not "arbitrary" at all; you must be looking at it, because you're using it.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#244

Post by digging »

lolinder wrote: post #222
digging wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe "toasts" aren't the bee's knees, but they work as lagging indicator that something happened that I otherwise wouldn't notice, and in some apps even lets me undo the unwanted operation. That does a lot to relieve my anxiety and help me use software with less frustration. All things that a message log does better than toasts!

Why not both? A message log can always be consulted later, but it doesn't give you a live feed of things that are happening. I'm also ADHD and, like OP, I appreciate having the stream of toasts that lets me know what the software did. It's saved my butt a bunch of times when I accidentally do something I didn't mean to (deleting instead of archiving, for example). A message log would just get ignored, but toasts help…

A message log can also be visible...? The only differences between messages in toasts vs messages in a log is that toasts control the user rather than the other way around.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#245

Post by DidYaWipe »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #207
adamc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're bad. Messages that are on the periphery of my vision/attention (imagine a widescreen monitor) are actively confusing. I'm working on THIS problem here and something flashes up over there. Half the time, as I refocus to read this annoying intrusion, it disappears. It's bad UX. Put your damned messages where my attention has already been directed to BY YOUR UI .

> Put your damned messages where my attention has already been directed to BY YOUR UI. Ok, so where does the toast go if you've already scrolled or otherwise navigated to a different area of the UI? These optimistic updated could take multiple seconds to succeed, and maybe as much as 30 seconds to fail.

If the "toast" can persist through that behavior, so can feedback positioned more sensibly. How does putting something on the other side of the (potentially huge) screen solve that "better?"

Not to mention that, if the operation fails, isn't it likely that the user will want to re-try? And that'll require access to the original control in all likelihood.

If the user scrolls away and the information is important, use a modal alert.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#246

Post by adamc »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #207
adamc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're bad. Messages that are on the periphery of my vision/attention (imagine a widescreen monitor) are actively confusing. I'm working on THIS problem here and something flashes up over there. Half the time, as I refocus to read this annoying intrusion, it disappears. It's bad UX. Put your damned messages where my attention has already been directed to BY YOUR UI .

> Put your damned messages where my attention has already been directed to BY YOUR UI. Ok, so where does the toast go if you've already scrolled or otherwise navigated to a different area of the UI? These optimistic updated could take multiple seconds to succeed, and maybe as much as 30 seconds to fail.

If you can't show me a spinner or other indicator that this is an ongoing operation (which I find preferable), and you think I will have moved away from the controls for this, then put it in a central location that I will see even if I am still on your control, not in a little box on the other side of the screen.

These toast notifications just are a bad solution. I often miss them, because I'm, you know, doing work, not scanning my monitors for notifications I mostly don't care about. (Redundancy is not harmless. Redundancy also trains me that your messaging is mostly noise.)

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#247

Post by DidYaWipe »

Sakos wrote: post #86
arcbyte wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you worked with an old person? Redundancy in UX confuses them. The closer you can get to the whole UI being a single sentence and two buttons the better.

Have you? Things disappearing with insufficient explicit feedback for what actually happened to the things is one of the most common issues I've encountered with older computer users. I think it's the most common issue. Toasts add persistency and visibility for users who barely or don't understand the UIs they're interacting with, which makes it easier to understand what happened. If Outlook gave feedback to every us…

The whole point is that they DON'T add visbility, because they're not presented where the user is working. Age isn't even a factor.

It's time to stop blaming "age" when the more likely explanation is EXPERIENCE. Many people learned to use computers in an age of well-understood GUIs that hewed to standards that evolved for very good reasons. For example, buttons that were depicted (in a clean, not cheesy "skeuomorphic") manner. You can tell at a glance if a well-depicted button is on, off, or disabled.

Then enter the idiotic "flat" design fad, where the entire screen was an Advent calendar of no controls at all... or is it ALL controls? Click on every piece of text and every rectangle to look for the hidden goodies.

Those conversant in (and tolerant of) more-recent UI have simply become accustomed to shitty UI. They've either forgotten how bad it is, or grew up not having experienced good design. Another great example that has disappeared in many areas is GREYING STUFF OUT. If something is not currently usable because it's not applicable, you don't just make it disappear. You grey it out, so users can learn

1. That the function exists 2. Where the function resides 3. What conditions must be satisfied to make it work

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#248

Post by oasisbob »

> What's worse than a toast? No feedback at all.

I'd argue that the YouTube iOS app found a more worse toast: the confirmation toast for removing videos from a playlist covers the original menu which triggered the action in the first place.

Makes it very hard to perform the same action repeatedly.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#249

Post by savolai »

lolinder wrote: post #46

I'm not convinced. Most of the argument seems to be that redundant UX is bad UX: > But by archiving the email, the email disappears from the list, which already implies the action was successful. > In this example, the button already includes a confirmation so the toast is entirely unnecessary. I vehemently disagree with the idea that just because you're already communicating something one way it's bad UX to include…

As someone with a human-computer interaction degree, this thread deeply saddens me. In general, human-computer interaction is considered a field of computer science, which I guess hn has a good representatin of.

And yet the discussion here seems to veer off from actual verification of whether toasts actually work, and all the discussion seems to be purely speculation. Granted, there is general argumentation too that's valid to some degree, and it's good to present that, and at the end of the day the only actual data that can guide this decision for a given user interface comes from user testing that is highly context sensitive.

Why? Because there exists no general answer to this question at all. It depends deeply on who your users are, and before the industry understands this basic fact that we as a species are mostly incapable of predicting what different persons from a different user group point of view will be, usability testing will be critically needed, and until we actually start doing it, we will keep creating user interfaces that marginalize everybody but ourselves.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#250

Post by hunter2_ »

zahlman wrote: post #234
tomaytotomato wrote: post #42

How about just getting rid of all food related jargon; salad bars, burgers, toasts, heroes etc.? As a backend developer this stuff is mind-boggling, just call it "notification widget", or a "confirmation widget" etc. Try explaining what toast is to an Indian subcontractor who has never eaten toasted bread in their life and then apply that to the UX usecase. Removing these terms will also improve accessibility and und…

Hold on, how is "hero" a food metaphor? I mean, I understand that there are some regional dialects that use that name for a "submarine" sandwich (and there are many other names for it), but I can't fathom how a full-screen image at the top of a website has any metaphorical connection to that. To me, that makes even less sense than the idea that such an image somehow is supposed to do a heroic job of advocating for wh…

It's not a food metaphor, nor is it about displaying something heroic, although that's much closer. "Hero image" comes from "hero props" which "are the more detailed pieces intended for close inspection by the camera or audience. ... The name refers to their typical use by main characters in a production." [0]

Since the name arises from use by a hero, then to extend the metaphor by direct analogy, the actual hero is the overall article/content in which a hero image is contained.

That said, a "hero sandwich" is that which "one needed to be a hero to finish" [1] so does all tie back to the idea of heroism regardless.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prop#Hero

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_Paddleford#Writing_...

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