[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Messages notification

[Gary Martin]

Hi Martin,

On 17 Nov 2010, at 19:17, Martin Abente wrote:

> Change the "want" for "need" and we have: 
> 
> "When there is something they _need_ to know" 
> 
> And that is exactly the same reason why we are already using the Icon notifications and the same reason why we are already using Alert widgets all over sugar (outside activities), and there are still more cases that we don't do because we simply don't have this feature fully implemented yet.
> 
> That's all i got.

I'm just running through another more interesting notification mockup, specifically of each of the proposed frame corner notification history palettes, as these seem the feature you/dextrose need/want to focus on. 

Before we go too much further, could you/dextrose provide a list of some example notification messages that you want to provide the user, and if possible what you think a user would do with that information? 'Just useful to know', 'look in some help activity/document/web page', 'go to the teacher and ask', 'record in some way for future correspondence' are all reasonable user outcomes. David seemed to touch on this in his previous email referencing 'typical support staff'.  I just want to get a clearer idea of what you/dextrose hope to achieve via the notification effort.

So far, just to summarise things, the concrete examples I've seen are:

"Journal: Your journal is almost full, please erase unnecessary entries." Great, this will allow us to drop the constantly repeating journal is full dialogue that get's in the way while trying to clean-up.

"Battery: Your battery is running out of charge!" I'd also suggest we might want a notification for both connecting to power, and being disconnected from power.

"Gureito News: Hey kids! Online puppets festival this weekend, don't miss it!" This one doesn't seem to have such a sane corner to appear from and seems to be a new messaging feature – in your mockup you placed it in the buddy notification corner (top right). I assume will come from a school server? This might tie in reasonably well with the idea of in activity bubble chat with other collaborating users (Eben was working on this idea some time back). I'll try and work this in to my next mockup, I think that top right buddy notification corner could be used to show simple in activity user chat, and "Gureito News" server notifications.

Existing notifications already in Sugar:

Journal/Shell: Send to friend notification. Pulses in top left corner and then adds a download icon to the top frame for user interaction.

Activity: Private collaboration invitation. Pulses in the top left corner and then adds an activity icon to the top frame to allow user interaction.

IRC: User mentioned your nickname. If IRC activity is not in focus, it will trigger a pulsing icon in the top right corner to indicate a user message. Not quite a buddy notification event in the Sugar collaboration layer sense, but more than close enough.

Copy: Item copied to the clipboard. Pulses icon in bottom left corner and adds a clipping icon to the left frame edge for user interaction.

I know it's a little chicken and egg, but do you have any specific errors you get in the field that notifications can help in a local resolution? I'll try and come up with some more possible cases for my next mockup, but that's just me trying to guess. I have some fair ideas for device notifications e.g. wireless connects/disconnects, gsm/3g errors, new storage media attached, storage media disconnected without being gracefully unmounted first etc.

Regards,
--Gary

> Abrazos, :)
> 
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 1:10 PM, David Farning <dfarning at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This patch has a place in Dextrose.  Dextrose is looking at the
> > question, "How can we provide support staff the necessary information
> > to effectively fix and/or report problems to a higher level of service
> > and support?"
> 
> Let's not jump to conclusions.
> 
> Can this be limited to... when the user _wants_ it?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> m
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
> 
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