Toasts are bad UX

> When the loading indicator disappears, it implies the action has completed

No. The author assumes that it implies that. For the user though, it can imply many things:

- Something loading in the area next to the text, indicating something's coming up to that region soon, and when it disappears, it might be interpreted as a loading error.

- UI is doing something, so not responsive anymore.

- UI is doing something, and if the user does something, they might disrupt that process.

- Internet connection is slow.

In general, a loading indicator that starts running when a checkbox is selected is bad UX.

Better UX alterntives would be:

- Directly animate the checkbox itself when clicked (like pulsating it, or the checkbox square starting to rotate in a pattern, etc), and show a stationary checkbox when the operation is complete.

- Don't show user anything at all, let the checkbox show that it's been checked right away. If the user wants to leave before it's processed, just warn them about unsaved changes. (FastMail does that, for example)

- Don't use checkboxes for asynchronous UI actions that can take time. Use buttons instead, so the user understands the UX language. Then, you can use loading animations as much as you want.

To me, toast is a mobile-first design concept, where all information on screen can be perceived in a glance. The assumption which supports this concept is no longer true on a larger screens.

Microsoft Windows' notifications are basically all toasts. Horrible UX.

The all time you are actually interested in one and want to react to it, it doesn't stick around long enough.

I hate how the bubbles capture an area around them. If you need to click on something close to a notification, the click goes to the notification instead of that thing. That's sneaky and shitty. The border you see rendered in pixel should be the border and that's it.

This extra click area is not adjustable. There's an unanswered SO question about it:

https://superuser.com/questions/1490776/is-it-possible-to-ad...

Same here, in the last 2 years, my eyesight has gone down a lot (combination of astigmatism and presbyopia is not great). I used to love the growl style notifications from macos, now I always miss them (and often miss the alert that I only have 5% battery left).

The issue with the not seeing toast notifications is that in some apps it’s the only true notification that the request went through to the server so missing them when they failed for whatever reason is rather annoying

> The "Undo" button in the toast is unnecessary because the user can just click the checkbox again

I’ll start by saying that I particularly appreciate this feature. There are countless times where I archived an email, only for the toast to tell me that I clicked the report spam button. I’d have been completely unaware otherwise.

The other issue underlying toasts that the OP is missing: Web operations are async. There is no telling whether your operation succeeded, failed or did even register with the server it’s communicating with. A toast gives you an async update about the state of the server.

I do agree that some toasts are obnoxious and for example can’t be dismissed while they are hiding an important UI content.