Design for mobile and this is less of a problem. Toasts are right there!
Toasts are bad UX
291–300 of 401 posts
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#292I quite like the information side bar on the right hand side of the Civilization 6 game. You get a long queue of icons indicating some result/status/notification. You can hover the mouse over them or click on them to get more information. The icons will be gone in the next turn or later depending on how relevant they are to the current game play. They are for historic information and semi-transient.
Games can be the epitome of good UI feedback.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#293I quite like the information side bar on the right hand side of the Civilization 6 game. You get a long queue of icons indicating some result/status/notification. You can hover the mouse over them or click on them to get more information. The icons will be gone in the next turn or later depending on how relevant they are to the current game play. They are for historic information and semi-transient. Games can be the…
re: civ6, ime there are persistent and 1-turn transient notifications. if you deal with something related to a persistent notification, the notification doesn't go away. meanwhile many of the 1-turn transient messages have relevance well past that one turn.
so yeah, I get what you're saying but it may not be the best example
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#294Design for mobile and this is less of a problem. Toasts are right there!
This is such a great callout.
We have to acknowledge that conversation around this is also platform dependent.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I just disagree that leaving off the toast is (in the cases cited) valuable. But adding a toast isn't free. It's a distraction, and arguably a pretty intense one for ND folks -- especially when it becomes a standardized message center with multiple items queued up. In many cases the most useful toasts would also be better if they weren't toasts. For me, the most useful toast I interact with also demonstrates why to…
> But adding a toast isn't free. It's a distraction, and arguably a pretty intense one for ND folks -- especially when it becomes a standardized message center with multiple items queued up. Diagnosed with ADHD, so I'm guessing an ND folk here: modern applications in general, and webshit in particular, give me huge anxiety because of all the eventual consistency and optimistic actions bullshit[0], coupled with flakin…
I don't even know if I'm neurodivergent, but apps that optimistically indicate success instead of using spinners give me a ton of anxiety. I see that in my wife and other family members, too. Even looking at something that explicitly says "Your order has been placed!" leaves people in a state of nervous suspense until we find a text message or an email to verify. In the absence of that, they just don't know. Part of my techie privilege is that I know a page refresh can usually reveal the truth.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should complex websites have a notification center where you can look at prior notifications? Would this be alike enough to existing desktop metaphors to be easily recognizable or simply confusing. Maybe your browser should could have an icon for same instead making it more standardized across different sites.
I'd go for an action log . It's almost the same thing, but notifications imply ephemeral pokes about some of the stuff that happened, mixed with engagement boosting spam - there's a lot of unpredictability embedded in this concept, as the app is usually trying to guess what you may (or it thinks you should) find relevant. An action/activity log is just a reverse-chonological log of things that happened. You could mak…
I love this idea! And also I like how it implies dispensing with the wrong notion that I care about every so-called notification and thus that I have “unread” notifs.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Browsers that support JavaScript typically implement the Notification API. This API asks for user confirmation to allow popups and give the programmer the opportunity to display notifications with a text (body) along with an descriptive icon and header. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_notification#JavaScript
Of course, this is just abused by sites to spew their garbage outside the confines of their own pages, which makes the API effectively dead.
Indeed. I would rather all browsers just disable it by default with not even the popup asking if I want it. If I install a webapp as a PWA then maybe ask me. Otherwise? Website operators are on crack if they think I want them to be able to spam my desktop multiple times a day even months or years after I visited them!
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#298I'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…
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.
The given examples seem pretty poor. An email disappearing from a list doesn’t tell me it was archived. Maybe it was deleted, maybe I accidentally hit some button and I’m not sure what happened.
The toast makes it clear.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#299For me the worse aspect is that they disappear (too quickly), and that they sometimes unnecessarily draw attention to themselves for success messages where you would trivially assume the action to succeed. The combination of the two is particularly vexing: Your attention gets unnecessarily diverted, but you don’t know if it wasn’t actually important because it disappeared too fast. Conversely, there’s also a variatio…
As a thought experiment, how long should a toast remain on the screen? Ideally you want the user to have time to read it, but since you don't know how long it will take for them to glance up, and you don't know their reading speed, there isn't a safe bound. I ran into this with my son just today, he is working on his reading speed and we were using a new app together. I kept showing toasts and he was struggling to ke…
MacOS and phones do this well, the toast is up for what feels like enough time to read it, but if you didn’t catch it, you can slide open the notifications ui and see all the previous ones for as long as you want.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#300For me the worse aspect is that they disappear (too quickly), and that they sometimes unnecessarily draw attention to themselves for success messages where you would trivially assume the action to succeed. The combination of the two is particularly vexing: Your attention gets unnecessarily diverted, but you don’t know if it wasn’t actually important because it disappeared too fast. Conversely, there’s also a variatio…
As a thought experiment, how long should a toast remain on the screen? Ideally you want the user to have time to read it, but since you don't know how long it will take for them to glance up, and you don't know their reading speed, there isn't a safe bound. I ran into this with my son just today, he is working on his reading speed and we were using a new app together. I kept showing toasts and he was struggling to ke…
There is no good answer, it's just not a good UI pattern for that reason.