Toasts are bad UX • Hacker News Board

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#371

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:24 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #353

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#372

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:31 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #268

DidYaWipe wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the main point, which is that the "toast" is nowhere near where you're looking when performing the action.

I didn't miss that point, I'm arguing that that point doesn't prove anything about the merits of a toast. Their examples are all arguments of where local information should have been displayed. I agree with them in general. I just think that a toast should also be displayed in each of the situations they identify. What seems to have happened is that they correctly identified a problem with lack of local information a…

> I just think that a toast should also be displayed

As long as it can be disabled. I find toasts to be actively bad and don't want them to happen at all.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#373

Post by TRiG_Ireland » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:56 PM UTC

iggldiggl wrote: post #334

hn_acker wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to your examples, I hate when video players (both mobile or desktop) don't let me hide the video player controls when the player is paused! I also dislike having to wait a few seconds upon starting/resuming a video for the controls to fade away.

> I also dislike having to wait a few seconds upon starting/resuming a video for the controls to fade away. I get the annoyance, but especially on mobile, it conversely helps if you want to advance the video by as few frames as possible to catch a freeze-frame gag or something like that. If the UI immediately disappeared upon resume, you'd have to triple tap to immediately pause the video again. (On desktop you can j…

I sometimes use a Bluetooth speaker on mobile just so I have a pause button handy. Playing a video full screen requires me to tap once to bring up the controls, and then again to pause.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#374

Post by TRiG_Ireland » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:58 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #221

exmadscientist wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If something is so hard to implement that everyone who tries gets it wrong (to a first approximation), then maybe the concept is bad. Or, at least, the concept isn't fully baked and is missing something critical.

Most implementations of toasts-with-actions that I've seen don't have the problem OP described. I more often find myself manually dismissing them than wishing they'd have stuck around longer.

So because you are a fast reader and have a fast reaction time with your mouse, toasts are good for everyone? No.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#375

Post by TRiG_Ireland » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

Maxion wrote: post #340

xp84 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yep, if this feature was limited to the window in focus, then the API could make sense. The way it is now, I know all savvy users will just block it, and many of the non savvy ones will too... Complete waste of time to dedicate developer resources too over e.g. in-line toasts.

Sometimes (as in a chat app) I want the window to notify me when anything changes, so I don't have to sit and look at it.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#376

Post by dang » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 4:08 PM UTC

clarkdale wrote: post #356

dang wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't be sorry - that's a great point!

I guess for me the "pin the comment" thing is a workaround for a limitation in the software that we haven't had a chance to fix it—that is, there should be a way in the standard HN UI to associate multiple links with a story (including the archive links that many users post into the threads). Whatever mechanism we build for that, it will certainly be community-driven in the sense that users will be the ones submitting alternative links, and perhaps voting on their relevance somehow. This is related to karma too, of course.

That doesn't resolve your objection, which I think is legit. But I wanted to share why I do that.

There are other forms of pinned comment too, such as the "if you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're follwing the site guidelines" admonishment that I sometimes put into threads on inflammatory topics.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#377

Post by Grustaf » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 4:09 PM UTC

It's a bit unfair, to toasts, to use two examples from Google products, they are terrible at UX.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#378

Post by Grustaf » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 4:11 PM UTC

JamesSwift wrote: post #361

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Undo via ephemeral toast seems like a bad idea also. I guess if the toast hanged around until the next toast it might make sense?

Theres an implicit assumption that the actions being offered an “undo” are semi-important/permanent. In other words, if you delete an email and it goes to the trash folder: good use of toast + undo If you empty the trash, and there is nowhere the user can go to unempty it: bad use of toast + undo Its also useful as a sleight of hand eg when cancelling an action you havent yet taken (which actually is generally what a…

Putting an email in trash seems like exactly the kind of action that does _not_ need a toast, since it's easy and obvious to undo.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#379

Post by Dalewyn » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 4:40 PM UTC

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…

>Redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug

Too much junk information trains users to ignore them, which leads to hilarity ensuing if there also is valuable information every once in a while.

Moral is don't send information to a user if it's not strictly necessary.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#380

Post by _yb2s » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 4:41 PM UTC

dev213 wrote: post #367

_yb2s wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty much every well-known UI library, including Bootstrap, Angular Material/MUI & Chakra UI, calls these Toasts.

Interesting... I am a longtime Bootstrap user, and they offer a large number of other things that can be configured for the same purpose- alerts, popovers, modals, etc.

I've never actually noticed the toasts component itself, but have done the same thing with other components. I wonder if the feature was added after I started using bootstrap ~14 years ago, and I mostly just kept using the components I was used to.

Looking at it, I don't see myself using it because of the 'dismiss' button. I don't like things that obscure the UI, or encourage unneeded extra interaction, when I can pass info to the user without doing that.