User Feedback: Prioritize Unread Notifications

Feature
1

Feature request: always show unread notifications at the top of the notification list:

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One of my users clears the notifications one-by-one and was bothered that they need to hit the arrow at the bottom to reveal unread notifications instead of unread notifications taking priority at the top.

This behavior is also inconsistent with the notification categories that do prioritize the unread ones:

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Either way, I agree with the complaint and wanted to make a request for it to be changed or at least an explanation why it is better with the current behavior.

4 Likes
2

Just throwing my two cents in here, it’s honestly really odd that most notifications do follow this behavior, however reactions do not.

1 Like
3

When we implemented the new notifications menu last year, we originally had likes sort as other notifications do, but got a fair bit of feedback that it was unnecessarily noisy and was causing people to feel like they had to clear them.

We then adjusted that logic with this change:

We want to allow unread likes to sort lower than newer, read notifications on the main tab so that people don’t feel like they must clear these notifications.

So, for the main tab, the sorting algorithm changes from:

  • unread with priority in reverse chronological order
  • unread without priority in reverse chronological order
  • read in reverse chronological order

to:

  • unread with priority in reverse chronological order
  • unread without priority in reverse chronological order (but exclude likes)
  • read (and likes, whether read or not) in reverse chronological order
4

I can see what @piffy is getting at.

The Op circled my like of one of his posts. The notifications above the one circled have been viewed in the main notifications list

So for unviewed notifications should be at the top of the list Some of the notifications in main list are even likes that had been viewed

In likes notification list it correctly shows my like at top as new With previously viewed likes ordered below

1 Like
5

That does make sense, but what if it was sorted like:

  • unread with priority in reverse chronological order
  • unread without priority in reverse chronological order (but exclude likes)
  • unread likes in reverse chronological order
  • read in reverse chronological order

Would that work?

6

I think if it the order has to be explained in bullet points and each tab has a different set of bullet points that explains that specific tab’s order, it may be too complicated.

I can appreciate that it might be annoying to clear out a bunch of likes before getting to the meaningful stuff. Maybe likes shouldn’t appear in that section if they are mostly useless then? Or isn’t there already a setting to control how your like notifications are received? if someone is being drowned in likes maybe that’s the solution?

2 Likes
7

This could be an interesting idea to have an option in preferences to configure General Notifications?

That way a user can configure what things they want in general notifications?

1 Like
8

Another idea would be to change the bell to simply

You have notifications

With an Arrow/for beside each one down the list on Right below Bell

Then the user clicks on the notification type which the icon already shows a number of.

Maybe doable with a theme-component ?

9

The issue we observed was that people were feeling compelled to visit every like notification or dismiss them to clear them out, and that was not a feeling or behavior we want to encourage.

Once we made this change that problem disappeared and there were no other issues we observed.

It is more difficult to explain, but we haven’t felt the need to do so for except here among the most inquisitive of users.

For those that really want to see all their unread likes easily, the option remains available to do so by going to the likes tab in the notifications menu.

3 Likes