I don’t know the history of how this feature came to be and the icons chosen for it, but over the years I have found it confusing to come across this Normal button which seems to indicate that the user I am looking at is normal!? It only makes sense once you select it and see the pulldown, but I don’t have any incentive to do so because I have never needed to mute or ignore a user. So I am confronted constantly with this confusing bit of UI on everry discourse site I am on and wondering if I can change a user to abnormal.
New users or guests on Discourse for Teams sites who are not allowed to start messages or access staff features here also only see this one lonely button and nothing else in the top right corner.
I get that they also should be allowed to mute or ignore users they don’t want to hear from, but maybe this location for the setting is a bit overly prominent? Would it make sense to move it down to the bottom right corner, like on the user admin page where the most dangerous buttons to impersonate, delete user, etc live? Muting/ignoring a user is an extreme measure, if you ask me.
If the feature wants to live on in its current location, it seems to me it should at least match other places where you can choose a notification level, with the bell icon which indicates that the button is about notifications. Below is an example from a category. Normal and Muted icons could be copied from here, and ignored could remain with the eyeslash as it is now.
If the bell is not desired due to its similarity with the topic notifications, maybe a different set of glyphs? Perhaps replacing Normal with Not Muted could be another option.
For the default state, I wonder if it would be better to label the button with the action you’re taking instead of the current state? Would that be confusing?
Ol’ Jakob Nielsen would be appreciative of showing the state in some way or another without having to click into the drop-down.
Maybe the button could look something like the status icon+type of action (rather than reusing the “mute” term, and display that term consistently regardless of the state, e.g.:
You’re right that part of the conundrum is deciding what to display there for the “normal” state of notification from a user … but I do think not showing the control at all, while an interesting idea, would result in pushback from a number of communities.
I would prefer we specifically focus on the glyph at this time, and defer any discussion about text to a later date.
Now that I see this again… why not use the same icons we use for topic/category tracking? we use the same words… and normal/muted concern notifications in a similar way.
I actually feel better about the wording if we go that way too.
Edit: we also already use the bell slash in user notification preferences
Notifications
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