Toasts are bad UX
maxschmitt.me
Toasts are bad UX
1–10 of 401 posts
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#2I haven't heard many developers/designers talk about the overused practice of using toasts for UI feedback.
The post shares a few real-world examples and illustrates some of the problems with how they use toasts.
What do you think? Are toasts overused? In which cases do you use them in your own apps?
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#3I haven't heard many developers/designers talk about the overused practice of using toasts for UI feedback. The post shares a few real-world examples and illustrates some of the problems with how they use toasts. What do you think? Are toasts overused? In which cases do you use them in your own apps?
Toasts should be used if there is no direct relation to or interaction with a visible UI element: notification, heavily asynchronous processes, out-of-view modifications.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#4I haven't heard many developers/designers talk about the overused practice of using toasts for UI feedback. The post shares a few real-world examples and illustrates some of the problems with how they use toasts. What do you think? Are toasts overused? In which cases do you use them in your own apps?
[flagged]
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#5Strongly agree. I guess toasts work better for mobile screens as they are smaller and mostly vertical, so the element spans the whole screen width. If it needs to be there and should be responsive, I would prefer it to be an alert in the upper-right corner of big screens.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#6Toasts are bad UX for an app which is used in a casual context, yes. The odds that an untrained user missed them and becomes confused are quite high.
But there is nothing wrong with a toast in a pro app. The pro user will get used to where feedback comes from on the screen and find it is second nature to notice the toast.
In practice, there are very few UX principles that generalize across every interface.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#7Maybe bad UX, but global error / success handling of network requests is way easier than handling in every component that triggers one.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#8The solutions seem to rely on a user that doesn't navigate before the action is completed. Does he propose locking the UI in the meantime, or to optimistically show the user a success result?
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#9I haven't heard many developers/designers talk about the overused practice of using toasts for UI feedback. The post shares a few real-world examples and illustrates some of the problems with how they use toasts. What do you think? Are toasts overused? In which cases do you use them in your own apps?
I'd speculate that their overuse comes from convenience of displaying any message by throwing in a `showToast("Foo!")` opposed to altering each UI component to show the relevant feedback.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#10Toasts are bad UX for an app which is used in a casual context, yes. The odds that an untrained user missed them and becomes confused are quite high. But there is nothing wrong with a toast in a pro app. The pro user will get used to where feedback comes from on the screen and find it is second nature to notice the toast. In practice, there are very few UX principles that generalize across every interface.
The pro will train himself to whatever good or bad thing you'll throw at him. The point is not about identifying generalization that works everywhere, it's just to have enough care for making the good choices at the right places.