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Toasts are bad UX

maxschmitt.me

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Re: Toasts are bad UX

#341

Post by Maxion »

ryandrake wrote: post #146
JamesSwift wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned this in another comment, but the whole reason the archive is able to be optimistic is partially because they offer the undo via toast. Otherwise its likely they would add an 'are you sure' plus a loading-state when doing these "semi-destructive" actions.

You can offer Undo via things other than toasts, though. In fact, I wish more software offered Undo--the Undo feature has kind of gone out of fashion since the early 2000s. You should be able to Undo anything (and follow the Undo chain back through many past actions). We somehow lost this ability from software.

Undo's (and especially re-do) are quite hard and resource intensive to code, especially for web apps that can be simultaneously accessed via multiple devices.

E.g. you can take action A on your laptop, followed by action B on your phone. Undoing action A may not be easily possible if it was followed by action B.

To make that work properly you need to activel sync states between all the users devices using e.g. websocket or what-have-you. Handling edge cases becomes quite the nightmare, e.g. phone has poor connectivity.

Only the big guys would have budget to do these sort of things (And make them work well).

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#342

Post by Maxion »

treflop wrote: post #270
cowsandmilk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfortunate thing is they aren’t communicating the same thing. Taking the YouTube example, the checkboxes are 100% optimistic while the toast notification indicates that the request to the backend that was fired off asynchronously was successful. With the archive message example, it is the same thing. The message is removed from the list optimistically and the toast message is representing that the message was ac…

A grade A implementation would keep a local state that syncs to the server, indicates a sync is in progress, possibly stacks changes to reduce latency if there are a lot of changes + a slow connection and, to a user, gives me utmost confidence that I’m not going to lose data. Now my presence is to use this grade A type of implementation because I like very solid software and I’ve done it so many times now that I can…

Even with your description of a gradee A webapp that uses local state management effectively + shows syncing + queues with stacking + connectivity detection and exponential retries etc. I still feel like toasts can be useful to indicate to the user when are not in the "normal" state. I feel like especially mobile apps fail horribly at this, it is very normal to walk around a city and end up in dead spots. Having a clear indication from the device that we are longer in Kansas can be very useful. IMO toasts that plop up for successfull actions are often quite useless and redundant.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#343

Post by Maxion »

nicolas_t wrote: post #327
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.

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…

I think this is because a global toast service is trivial to implement, one service class / event listener, one UI component. It takes one ticket to make, and then it's just a matter of implementing the event publishes // serviceclass calls. This is much faster than implementing a plurality of ways to indicate loading and resulting success/fail.

In other words, it's a crutch that is often taken when there isn't enough budget/resources to make a proper UI (Or enough care/love/interest/skill).

I have definitely myself gone down the quick path of implementing only server side validation + toast service for projects where the customer just does not have the budget to do things entirely properly.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#344

Post by Maxion »

lolinder wrote: post #72
latexr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. For example: while OP uses a magnifier, lots of other people use a screen reader. "Loading indicator disappeared" is a tricky thing to communicate clearly with audio. "Toast: save successful" is trivial.

This is something that I think a lot of people miss. There is for sure a reason why google has that toast. One shouldn't just dismiss what the big tech guys do in terms of UI because they are among those who have the most resource to spend on it, and also the most amount of users. So for them it makes a lot of sense to spend effort to cater to people with various disabilities, as there is financial profit in there for them.

For a small regional golf court chain who want to build an online tool for reserving tee times? They most definitely won't have the budget to do things entirely properly.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#345

Post by jlmorton »

lproven wrote: post #189

I did not like this. This is why: * Embedded example video doesn't work on Firefox. * Reasoning reads more like post-hoc justifications to me. * Last and most important: does not explain what "toasts" are. Aside: The word in its default English usage is not countable. Making a plural means it must be the usage of clinking glasses of alcoholic drink, to indicate a salutation to a person or thing. They seem to mean "to…

I was also amused by a UX complaint on a site that is totally borked in a non-obvious way on Firefox.

It's not totally broken, it shows the first frame of the image, there's just no indication at all that the image is actually meant to be a video, there is no play control, and it just looks like a static image.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#346

Post by phito »

FatalLogic wrote: post #156
sebtron wrote: post #76

For anyone as confused as I was, this article is not about toasted bread [1], but about a type of UI widget [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_(food) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toast_(computing)

It's ironic that a person writing about poor communication paradigms didn't explain what "toast" means here. It's the most important word on their page, and it's obvious that some people, even technically-minded folks, don't understand the jargon. But could be they got extra engagement from readers who are interested in baking and breakfast recipes?

It's just that it's a post made by a web developper for their web developper audience. Safe to assume they know what a Toast Notification is.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#347

Post by animal531 »

I find this interesting is games (and the development thereof). While playing people are usually concentrating really hard on something of their own choice, so they will often miss various popups trying to tell them vital things about how to play the game.

Probably the best way to do it is to force show them a handful of elements center screen, and then where those go into the smaller overall view. This is really intrusive though and you don't want to present too much information too quickly this way.

After that maybe if they're not interacting with a side segment for a while make it perform some action to draw attention, but its a fine line between not enough and too over the top.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#348

Post by sureIy »

Absolutely. Toasts, like any overlaid UI, is just a cheap and easy way to add information to the screen without affecting the layout. Cheap and easy doesn't make it good

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#349

Post by sureIy »

julienmarie wrote: post #38

A toast makes sense only in 1 case: when it's a notification that is unrelated with the current action of the user. Similar to OS types of notification that the defunct Growl (memories) invented. Any feedback from a user action should be done within the context of the user action. If the action is async, it should be clear and the feedback should instantaneously indicate that the action is queued for processing. In t…

> OS types of notification that the defunct Growl invented.

No. Growl came out in 2004, Windows XP had notifications in 2001. If you consider Clippy's messages notifications, we can go back to at least Microsoft Bob (1995)

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#350

Post by manbitesdog »

The only case where I see a reasonable toast case is for asyncronous events that are a response to a recently applied change.

Let's say the user wants to import some data source, and it says something like "Importing...". Sure, you can leave a notification in the menu, but if he did that import 1 minute ago, probably he wants to see some hint immediately. It's the same with the floating notifications in the phone.

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