UX improvements on header dropdown (notifications)

UX
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Continuing the discussion from New header dropdown / notification menu styles:

While I appreciate the recent visual improvements to the notification stylesheet, I believe we need to address some fundamental UX issues that impact both new and existing users.

The current system has several redundant navigation elements that create confusion.

We have All notifications and Other notifications serving similar functions, Messages and Chats with three separate entry points for messaging (menu item, chat bubble icon, and header link) all within the same interface section.

And Avatar versus Profile plus Summary (and Preferences) where activities and summary are housed inside the profile while notifications remain outside, creating inconsistent mental models.

The iconography also assumes familiarity with Discourse conventions:

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For new users, repeated icons lack intuitive meaning, creating barriers to adoption and increasing cognitive load during initial platform exploration.

I kindly think getting third-party UX consultation would be beneficial for this evaluation because as daily Discourse users, we’ve developed learned behaviors that mask genuine usability pain points.

Fresh eyes can identify friction that we’ve unconsciously adapted to—friction that newcomers experience as genuine barriers to meaningful platform engagement.

What are your thoughts on how to approach improving these interface elements?

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These aren’t really similar, though it may be unclear depending on the types of notifications you current have. “All notifications” is a combination of all the different notification types — it’s the primary notification feed.

“Other notifications” is for certain types of notifications that don’t fit into other filters (things like badges, edits, links, solutions).

Of course, the fact that you didn’t know that isn’t your fault and may be something we can work on clarifying.

Yeah we have some ideas for how to unify the navigation a little bit, hopefully we can get to them soon. I think messages and direct chats are a little redundant, but we have a lot of functionality tied to messages (email inboxes, moderation) and chat is optional… so we’re going to have both for the foreseeable future.

fortunately this is an easy one, the icons will all be unique after this is merged UX: make all preference icons unique by awesomerobot · Pull Request #33202 · discourse/discourse · GitHub

Thanks for the feedback!

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