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Toasts are bad UX

maxschmitt.me

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Re: Toasts are bad UX

#271

Post by bigblind »

xelamonster wrote: post #264
bigblind wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toasts showing up far from where the action is take also makes them super annoying for people (like me) who use screen magnifiers. I'm oftne using a site while zoomed in, and will completely miss a toast, because it never enters the "viewport" on the screen I'm looking at.

What kind of design choices do you find helpful with using a magnifier like that? It's not something I'd ever considered before, sounds tricky to design for but I'll try to keep it in mind now.

The two main things for me are:

- Put cause and effect close to eachother - Don't block my view based on mouse position. I hate video players that ofverlay the pause button when the mouse is over the video, or images that get obscured by some overlay when hovered. My zoom follows the mouse, so I can't move what I'm looking at and where my mouse is pointing independently.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#272

Post by the_other »

latexr wrote: post #68
the_other wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a computer mainly by using a zoom tool to magnify the area around my text and mouse/finger cursoe. I miss almosst all toasts and most notifications because they not where I’m working. For my use case, feed near the item I’m interacting with is the only valuable feedback.

None of that invalidates what your parent comment is saying. They’re not saying you should use toasts to the detriment of other options, but in addition to them. If anything, your comment reinforces the notion that redundant information is beneficial because you don’t know where the user is looking.

I was attempting to suggest toasts "are bad UX", but your points make a lot of sense. Thanks.

There was some discussion in the article and elsewhere in the thread about how a toast with an undo button could be a very useful interface pattern. It wouldn't work for me, so I would hope that UX designers that want to use toasts would also design in other means to find and execute an undo action.

For you, my comments reinforce that toasts are "good UX" when they contain redundant information. I'm warming to the idea. In parallel, for me, this discussion is reinforcing my intuition that "actions and feedback as close as possible to the area of interaction" should be considered the primary vector.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#273

Post by DidYaWipe »

brailsafe wrote: post #260
DidYaWipe wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't it depend on your platform, and isn't experimentation the way things become standardized? User notifications on MacOS are definitely standardized, but originally they were Growl notifications until Apple made it a first-party API and iterated on it.

Some conventions transcend platforms. The aforementioned greying-out, for example. And sure, we have to try something for it to become a standard. But in the end the standards percolate up because they're intuitive. The controversy over some of these "toasts" shows that they don't meet that bar.

And you are right in that the Growl-style notifications in Mac OS are standard now... but those are different from the ones in question here because they are not related to a control that the user was just manipulating. They could come from anywhere at any time, and thus they must be presented in a location independent of whatever the user is doing.

The Growl-style notifications work well because they're near the top of the screen, too. Users are used to status and information in menu bars and so forth, in accordance with the general top-down convention of presenting information.

Thinking it through, I did actually implement a "toast"-style alert for asynchronous issues in one application. It was at the top of the screen, though. I originally put it in there strictly for debugging, but I think I might have left it in the release. So I'm not entirely opposed to the idea, but mainly its placement in the examples discussed here.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#274

Post by codazoda »

JamesSwift wrote: post #233
codazoda wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are called toasts because they pop up from the bottom, similar to a piece of toast popping out of a pop-up toaster oven. I used these to display errors in an internal web app once, which was a major mistake. The users almost never saw them and when they did they didn't see them long enough to be able to communicate what the message said, often trying to paraphrase. I agree they are bad UX for most things…

> The users almost never saw them and when they did they didn't see them long enough to be able to communicate what the message said, often trying to paraphrase. Theres an art to writing terse copy for the toast, and picking durations that make sense. I think this is likely more a poor application of the pattern rather than the pattern itself being bad.

It’s extremely easy to get the “art” wrong. In my case, I didn’t always know what the errors were because they were returned from 3rd party API’s and many of them the application had never seen before. If there were a proper log somewhere, maybe, but toasts are very easy to use poorly.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#276

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

With SPAs, stuff happening in your browser doesn't imply any action has been taken on the server. Gmail lets you delete without an internet connection. If it never reconnects before the page is abandoned your changes won't be committed. A toast that is only triggered by a server acknowledgement has value.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#277

Post by reboot81 »

I truly despise toasts. They slide up or fade in in all corners or center top/bottom. But never in my visual field. Add to that 2x27” monitors and they are either missed or a distraction. Unraid have them, but they are customizable and offer history. Thats ok.

How difficult can it be to put a message next to the task, or in the center of the screen? Or offer a proper log of messages, such as Unraid does?

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#278

Post by bentcorner »

xelamonster wrote: post #264
bigblind wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toasts showing up far from where the action is take also makes them super annoying for people (like me) who use screen magnifiers. I'm oftne using a site while zoomed in, and will completely miss a toast, because it never enters the "viewport" on the screen I'm looking at.

What kind of design choices do you find helpful with using a magnifier like that? It's not something I'd ever considered before, sounds tricky to design for but I'll try to keep it in mind now.

Good questions - also note that fixes that would help magnifier people also benefit users who have overlapping windows and/or windows partially off-screen. (This is also an example of accessibility features helping people who are "fully-abled")

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#279

Post by rglover »

Strongly disagree with this. Toasts/alerts/etc. are a valid form of feedback in the UI. Inline feedback can be helpful/good (e.g., the copy/paste example in the article), but it can also be confusing if applied incorrectly.

A toast is a universal, out of the way confirmation of a user action. They shouldn't just be blindly waved off as "bad UX."

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