Notification Descriptions

Community Off Topic
1

Wish to request a feature.

Topic: Notifications

Requested feature: Notification Descriptions.

Summary:

After selecting the Notification button (Highlighted will say “profile, messages, bookmarks, and preferences”) Once pressed the icon will turn into a dropdown menu containing notifications giving the person who activated the notification, and the page the notification was on. This however does not describe to us the nature of the notification (Whether it be a “like” or reference of some kind.) Multiple occurrences by the same individual on a topic can occur having the notification alert you every time. (E.g. The individual Likes your comment, then posts a reply to your comment.) This can get confusing to the point I am clicking on the same notification several times to see the highlight on the page it takes me to.

Feature Description:

Adding a simple verb, or description to a status notification. Simple things such as "SoandSo Liked ForumPage", or "Replied to your post." Lengthy verbs or descriptions can be fought by using a character cap to the end of the string on the notification window. This way notifications wouldn't take too much of a size per notification.

Pros:

  • Finding useful notifications faster for users looking for replies, or messages on the forums.
  • Organizing notifications to be less of a clutter, and more straight forward in its use.
  • Members with constant notifications are more efficient to finding relevant data to their interests.

Cons:

  • Lengthy text can be unreadable in browsers on IOS devices, or browsers in windowed mode.
  • Understanding the meaning of each notification could lead to confusion in early uses
  • Navigation of the forum would rely more heavily on the notifications

Additional Remarks:

Another addition that should be implemented is a link to the users homepage in the notification window, allowing easy access to a users page would do two things.

  1. Increase mobility from user to user
  2. Increase organization in the notifications (E.g. <a href=http://discuss.codecademy.com/users/lolman/activity">lolman Replied to About the Meta category )

I understand this would cause further changes such as when highlighting a members name, it would not highlight the notification that way you can click on the notification or the name and get taken to different places on the forum. Even if this wasn’t to be implemented I would still suggest changing the color for the individuals name (perhaps colored by membership status “Member”, “Basic user”). Because:

Looks much better than:

When there are several notifications back to back.

Do you want to see this in CodeCademy?

  • Yes this would be awesome!
  • No, I like the way it is!
  • I really don’t care.

0 voters

Please take this into consideration and thank you in advance! -Alex

1 Like
2

I think that the icons are usually sufficient, but sometimes they’re confusing. For example, :point_right: means you’ve been invited to a topic, but it’s not immediately clear what that icon means. So I’m supporting this suggestion :slight_smile:

3

Oh, I wasn’t aware there were icons in the notification window. all I see is

.

“Profile”

lolman Notification Descriptions
etc.

“Logout”

4

Oh right, because you can’t see the icons - I forgot about that while I was writing my post :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

I see now, I was wondering why you would be asking for descriptions when we have these nice icons – or maybe you can’t see the following image either?

6

Nope, I cannot see any of those icons on my browser. But I still hold to my statement that it should be implemented if for no other reason than it looks nice…

–EDIT–

I can, however, see the picture you posted. And I feel very left out!