Overall I think we are making lots of progress here, the right hand side is working, but I am finding the contrast on read stuff very hard to read and see of grey is a bit sad.
Compare to this interactive artifact (clickable, try it out)
I kind of like the last option the most, cause it is clear and uncluttered, but the first 2 feel fine as well.
Thoughts? (also what’s up with Nathan … what an avatar 
)
(also the reduced border radius feels a tiny bit better)
Today some of the designers and I did some pairing and iterating on the styles. Here is where we landed.
Sam, I like the first two options your artifact shows as well. Will look more into those. For now, I think our most recent iteration gets us in a spot where the differentiation is a bit more clear.
To move further I think we’d need some tweaks to the template & copy.
CSI ENHANCE
Seems normal
Last one looks quite good! It communicates the unread status clearly, but is still very light. Similarly, I like the first one (though I don’t think the blue circle is necessary, so in comparison the last one wins). All other designs are “too much” for my personal taste.
On mobile I am getting “reddish” background instead of blue.
I am finding the light grey very hard to read, it feels washed out. Maybe we try with only greying the avatar decoration?
The contrast here is just very very hard on the eyes, especially on the non bold text.
I think this is why gmail ended up with using font-weight for the delineation.
Also on desktop, getting 2 different blues which is confusing.
Yeah, I’m finding this feedback interesting. It must be due to proximity, bold, spacing, and shorter width of text.
I am using the same color to signify “read” that our topic lists use.
That said, I do think the icon bg has something to do with this as well, which is why I like @keegan suggestion here:
One more option I am kind of wanting to implement is inline title w/ description. Something like this:
Is this on hover? Or is the list actually showing two diff colors of blue background on different items?
This one, yeah two diff colors. You need to get an account to require approval on local to see this.
Ah ok, the styles are applying to unread. Will add some css to target this one as well.
Can you send a screenshot of the mobile reddish bg?
The latest updates have been live for a couple days now. Wondering how everyone here feels about them.
I am generally good with it, but there is something about that light grey text that still bugs me. I still prefer it in black. Can we try that? leave icon grey but keep text in black on read notifications?
Except for that I prefer this styling to our original. Still think it is worth exploring some more radical options, but as an iteration it feels good.
Also @lindsey a big change we should think about is making the avatars show up by default, we are not doing that and so many default installs get this less than optimal default experience:
The changes @jordan.vidrine made here are refinements vs re-imagining, which is nice
The change has been merged.
Huh didn’t we try this at some point recently? I thought we’d given that a go and decided not to proceed for some reason. But I very much like the idea, the notification menu is much more interesting and informative with the avatars.
I think a good compromise here is to start by defaulting it on new installs
I think the big reason we held off is customisations people made
@jordan.vidrine I feel like we can enable this experiment now globally on meta (and pin this topic), and see if anyone complains, overall I think where we are at is better than our default.
@lindsey thoughts?
It is a evolutionary change that is subtly better in a few ways.
Done!
Enabled for all trust_level_0 users.
I still find the difference between white on blue and black on white easier to recognize than the difference between white on blue and white on dark grey
Maybe it’s because the icon is the first place I look at.
It is more important to me than the avatar. Because the one, who triggered the notification is also there as text, what I’m notified about is only there for moved posts, otherwise the icon is the only indicator.
Did something change regarding the font or icon size? My first impression is they are a bit larger now, but that might be because of the added white space. This creates a bit of a mismatch between the notification icons and the menu icons.
Also, the padding on the right of seems a bit too large to me.
Side note: I am using browser scaling to 90% (not sure how that would cause any issues, but browsers are odd sometimes 
).
The latest (and likely final) iteration is now live. I’m setting a bookmark reminder for myself for next week to merge if there are no further comments.
Thanks for evolving this nice feature. It’s way better than how it was over a year ago.
Must admit, though, I’m not completely convinced by the use of a full new line break before the description.
In my current instance you can see how much space is saved by the detail starting right after the username and the separation is achieved in any case by the bold type of the username against the lower weight of the description.
But if we retain the ability to customize that via CSS I’m good.
Speaking of which, does it make sense to have a class on this div?:
Yes that should definitely have a class@
