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Toasts are bad UX

maxschmitt.me

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Re: Toasts are bad UX

#81

Post by loughnane »

> 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.

Double-encoding information is good if the information is really important so long as the two ways you encode it always and only appear together. You see this in data visualization a bunch (think a bubble chart where larger circles also become a more saturated red).

Sure it doesn't satisfy some platonic ideal of purity, but for a distracted user it can lessen their cognitive load and so can be good UX.

The point about distance is interesting. Toasts popping up near the action could be neat.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#82

Post by layer8 »

For 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 variation where it stays on screen too long, obscuring a part of the UI you just wanted to see/use in that moment.

I like the traditional desktop approach where error messages are shown modally, so can’t be missed, and success messages are shown as normal unobtrusive text in the permanently displayed status bar, without timeout. When not getting an error modal, the user can simply assume that the action succeeded, but can look at the status bar for confirmation (plus potentially some auxiliary information), without any time pressure.

Some applications also offer a popup showing the history of status bar messages. In that approach, the status bar is like the last line of CLI terminal output, and you can call up previous output.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#83

Post by ervine »

yxhuvud wrote: post #58
ervine wrote: post #7

Maybe bad UX, but global error / success handling of network requests is way easier than handling in every component that triggers one.

Then refactor your app to make it easy. If it is hard in your tool, choose a different tool that make it easy.

Again, it's not hard - just being devil's advocate for when toasts are useful.

Less code, centralized messaging.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#84

Post by lolinder »

arcbyte wrote: post #80
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…

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.

Yes. And I've never once run into issues with redundancy of information being a problem. It's the clever things people do to hide information or to be concise that reliably get them confused.

> The closer you can get to the whole UI being a single sentence and two buttons the better.

Sure, but this is kind of my point—clever UX tricks to communicate things without words don't work for them. A toast is valuable for the tech-illiterate precisely because it uses English text to communicate its point, and having it exist in the same spot for every action makes it easier for them to pick up.

It's not the be-all end-all of UX design for the elderly, but it's a heck of a lot better than the alternatives proposed in TFA.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#86

Post by Sakos »

arcbyte wrote: post #80
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…

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.

Have you?

Things disappearing with insufficient explicit feedback for what actually happened to the things is one of the most common issues I've encountered with older computer users. I think it's the most common issue. Toasts add persistency and visibility for users who barely or don't understand the UIs they're interacting with, which makes it easier to understand what happened.

If Outlook gave feedback to every user action in a toast, then provided a universal history of every toast, you would probably resolve a significant amount of issues caused by user actions leading to unintended changes (and being unable to recognize that the action lead to a particular change, or even how the current state differs from the previous one).

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#87

Post by mannykannot »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #57
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…

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…

Fair enough, but when they are not communicating the same thing, there are no grounds for objecting to them on the basis of redundancy.

The problem with notification only of failure is that one is left uncertain about success, though I would agree that striking a balance between distraction and uncertainty is difficult.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#88

Post by jFriedensreich »

As always when there is a clickbaity title that you think cannot be true it just lacks any nuance. Toasts are for displaying updates on things that happen OFF SCREEN, eg when doing something that takes a while and navigating to another screen. In addition toasts require a home for context to work propperly. This can either be a stack of toasts for very simple applications or a notification sidebar that can be accessed from a bell icon or similar. Toasts need to be shown close to this entry point to their home, not on an opposite position of the screen. The 2 most common mistakes are: a) show toasts for things that happen on screen instead of showing feedback in the actual action UI (its fine to keep them in addition for consistnecy) b) not have a home where a user can see what happened combined with autohiding toasts after a few seconds. (i cannot count how often i saw some dangerous looking error toast but could not read it in time, leaving me with a bad feeling especially for important things like admin UIs)

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#89

Post by ervine »

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?

Aha fully-sighted and I've never noticed this... 15 years of mac use.

Re: Toasts are bad UX

#90

Post by mceachen »

kaoD wrote: post #63
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.

I assume you don't want a full screen reader if you're not already using one, but if toasts are properly implemented (big if), screen readers can actually present them accessibly via the ARIA alert pattern[0]. Wanted to mention in case you're not aware and maybe there's some tool somewhere (or some way to configure a screen reader?) so that you can keep your simple zoom workflow but still benefit from the ARIA alert…

Thanks for this! I visited your link and hadn’t seen such a nice demo with working code on w3.org before: whoever worked on these pages deserves kudos.
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