We’ve been working on improvements to the notifications menu and would love to get feedback from you! Your notification menu on Meta, accessible through your profile picture in the top right corner, has been redesigned and now displays user avatars associated with your notifications.
You can see before → after in the screenshots below:
The purpose of this enhancement is to provide some quick context about who prompted the notification and to make this area a little friendlier and more visually interesting.
We’re considering making this change more widespread in Discourse but would first love to know what you think! Please take a little time to experience this new notification menu as you use Meta, and share your reactions and feedback with us here.
In general, I like it when the avatar is used in addition to the username, because I often remember them better.
What I don’t like about the changes is that it is now emphasized several times who did something, but it’s much harder to see what happened. Both the added avatar and the username in bold highlight the user, while the symbol of what happened has become smaller and the title of the topic has lost its color highlighting.
Before, it was “you got a like from username at link”. Now it’s “avatar + username at link, and somewhere in small text, what actually happened.”
Maybe that’s good when you are more interested in “who” did something, but for a general overview of my notifications, “what” is more important for me. When I receive a new notification, the type is more important to me than who; an @mention interests me more than a like, no matter who liked my post.
And the avatars are quite noisy, because they all have different colors. The symbols were less distracting.
You caught me trying to whip my test site into shape for some screenshots
In this case, I updated the username so that you wouldn’t see a list of lindsey’s (enjoyable as that might be for some of us ). Old notifications before the username change were not updated after the fact.
I agree Moin, but with little twist — I don’t care at all who commented. So, for me avatars are just visual noise component.
I haven`t open notifications a while, so I have to check that likes are still hidden. I’m not here collecting likes and those have zero value for me, just like badges etc. But I realize too that I’m part of very small minority
I like that members are referenced more consistently across the app. I struggle a bit to process all the info though. Maybe it’s just because the current styles stand out a lot?
I think I’d find it easier on the eye with less bold black, rather using default colors for member names and icons (primary-high and primary-medium , instead of primary)
Could also prefer a position for the icon that stands out less (and wouldn’t need to be placed with absolute positioning which always gets distorted once you customize the app…)
Tend to agree with @nolo - I like the avatar icons, but find that the current bold black is a bit too prominent and I’m not sure about the icons overlaid on the avatars. In fact, I do like @nolo’s proposal quite a bit and would consider it an improvement over the initial proposal.
Two side notes:
If we are looking at notifications more generally, I feel they should be moved out of the user menu. I think the preview version of the new central theme already did this and we also find this pattern in other sites (and particular in other forum software like XenForo and Woltlab).
I was wondering if maybe the different subtypes of notifications should maybe be a horizontal filter menu within the general notification menu (since they are subsets of notifications as such instead
This might look problematic on mobile, the avatar is already eating up part of the available width, positioning the icon next to it would make even less room for notification description.
When I am the last poster in a PM exchange with someone, I see my own avatar, which is not really helpful. I actually wonder why I even get a notification for those.
It’s nice and can add more personality to the notificaitons, but I also find it very visually noisey.
Will there be an option to toggle it on/off? Perhaps it this be a user preference with a site-wide default?
As an example of the noisiness, all I want to do is read the titles of the topics, but my eyes are drawn first to the colourful pictures, and then to the blue alert/bookmark icons. The third thing my eyes lock to are names in bold, and then finally I my eyes move to the titles, but I find it very hard to focus on the titles because there are three things to the left of each title which have higher visual strength.
Is it possible to try this with text on the left and visual on the right?
Here the title takes priority as I read left to right. Perhaps a locale setting would be needed for users who read right to left.
Yeah I feel it’s noisy too, like @nolo mentioned this version is a lot heavier and there’s more general tension in the design because there are more elements…
I wonder if we can make it feel lighter again somehow
has this been released yet? I recently updated my self hosted Discourse and it seems like I already have this enabled. Which makes it difficult for me to compare the new vs. old, since I honestly cannot remember the fine details about what it looked like before. The screenshots in the OP seem to be slightly different zoom-levels which is also throwing me off a bit to compare. In general, I am definitely in favor of more compact designs, though its not clear to me if that type of change is included here or if its just from the screenshots being different sizes
). Old notifications before the username change were not updated after the fact.
