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Toasts are bad UX

maxschmitt.me

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Re: Toasts are bad UX

#351

Post by lproven »

jlmorton wrote: post #345
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.

> it shows the first frame of the image

Not for me. Big blank black space.

Could it be there is a correlation between poor use of human language and poor use of markup language? Between poor UI and poor cross-browser testing?

I lived with 2 different programmers for 2 extended periods of my life. Both were professional software developers. Both were startlingly poor at understanding how PCs worked, chose poorly and bought poor hardware, and then were unable to fix their own problems or install their own upgrades. Both were intolerant of alternative OSes or app choices because they were wedded to specific apps on specific OSes.

Now I can't safely generalise from that to all programmers, obviously, but it's a strong hint.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#352

Post by sureIy »

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?

Saving, when instant, does not need to notify the user. Not every action needs to notify the user.

As seen in the article, do we need a notification following a click to every checkbox? In most cases, the user should assume that the action is completed the moment it's taken. If not, you can add an inline loader and show a regular, maybe modal error if it happens.

"Save" actions, with the exceptions of large data, does not need further UI. Particularly the circle should be seen as a marker of the current state, not as a way to tell whether your action has completed successfully, so you shouldn't view it as a "10x more subtle notification"

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#353

Post by robertlagrant »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #243
nativeit wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if another thing errors at the same time? If you put the error just where you clicked it, you may well miss it. If all things like that happen in the same place (e.g. bottom right) then you won't.

It's pointless pretending there's one perfect guiding philosophy and all others are obviously wrong.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#354

Post by brainyz »

What if you click an action in a popup and closed the popup or navigate to another page in the SPA all-together. Without a toast you have no way of knowing if an async action failed. I agree though that we should try to put the info closer to the user's attention, but still Toasts should be used as a fallback.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#355

Post by TeMPOraL »

lolinder wrote: post #267
digging wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't a toast just the tail of a message log that's visible for a few seconds after a new message is added? I don't always want the entire log to be occupying space on my screen, but I do want to see when new items get added.

The problem is that everyone implements toasts, and no one implements the message log, even though it's the latter that's more important to have.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#356

Post by clarkdale »

dang wrote: post #256
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)

Thanks! I pinned the second link to the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41304011 . Would it be ok to assign you as the author of that comment? I don't want to take credit for your link.

I'm sorry to say this, but I don't think it's fair that you (a moderator) should be allowed to pin comments to the top. There may be dozens of helpful links sharing or clarifying context in the discussion. The community can use the upvote feature to sort comments.

Exceptions might be made in cases of misinformation or abuse.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#357

Post by 1oooqooq »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #310
cellularmitosis wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would much rather only get the toast if there is a failure to commit the change ... And being far on the screen from where I’m taking an action makes them even more of a distraction. But wouldn't this situation be even worse with a failure-only toast? A request timeout could happen 30 seconds after the fact. You're likely in a very different UI state at that point, and unless the error message is very specific, y…

I think it would be nice if the toast popped up and hid in a tray and you could expand it and see a toast history with timestamps.

oh, so a notification without priority?

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#358

Post by 1oooqooq »

the fact people are discussing and writing articles about something taken as true (toasts are bad) by all interaction designers who actually studied at some point...

that must be what astrophysicists feel like reading a flat earth discussion.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#359

Post by _yb2s »

phito wrote: post #346
FatalLogic wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve done a lot of web development and never heard the term. I even use them a lot but called them popup notifications or other terms. I’ve used lots of frontend toolkits that call these something else.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#360

Post by giancarlostoro »

I would argue there's definitely bad implementations of toast notifications. On iOS I wish I could have more control over them to where I can almost automate them, I have notifications that if I haven't looked at it in like 12 hours, just remove it. It is also too easy to dismiss them, and never get them back. I want a "History" panel somewhere, so I can recover accidental dismissals, maybe let it live for 24 hours before it wipes forever. Sometimes I get a notification I'm interested in and dismiss by mistake, from an app I can't remember, or somewhere impossible to find within the app (I'm looking at you Nextdoor). App devs, if you're going to send me a push notification, please archive them within your app if the OS wont.
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