When surfacing notifications from other wikis there is a balance to keep between (a) letting users know what is going on elsewhere and (b) not distracting users from the activities those users are making on a particular wiki. This ticket is intended to discuss options to adjust the behaviour of the notification badges for cross-wiki notifications in order to better achieve such balance.
# Background
Currently the notification panel supports this balance by grouping cross-wiki notifications in a single item placed at the end of the unread notifications (T114350): reachable but giving priority to pending work from the local wiki. However, notification badge reacts in the same way to all notifications regardless of their origin: the number shows the total count and the badge becomes highlighted as new notifications arrive.
# Problem description
Some [[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:T03hw9u0lnii21k4 | initial feedback ]] suggests that the badge behaviour regarding cross-wiki notifications may be distracting.
An example scenario to illustrate the problem (we can add more cases and details as we get a better understanding of the issue):
- Adriana is creating an article about a music band in Spanish Wikipedia. While working on it, she notices a notification badge being highlighted and calling her attention just to discover that it was produced by a notification about a discussion on a project from Mediawiki.org. She provided some feedback about this project in the past, but is not interested in following the conversation right now. As she edits the music band article in Spanish Wikipedia, similar notifications appear causing unnecessary distraction.
# Exploring solutions
Some possibilities explored for the badge behaviour:
- **Ignore cross-wiki notifications.** While this avoids distractions, it goes against the goal of providing visibility to the global wiki activities.
- **Count notifications globally but don't highlight on new cross-wiki notifications.** While keeping an overview of the total pending work, it will only draw use attention for what's new in the current context.
- **Don't count cross-wiki notifications but highlight as they arrive.** This can communicate that new activity happened but keep a clear count of the pending tasks for the current wiki only.
- **Distinguish cross-wiki events.** Surfacing in the badge the kind of events it contains (e.g., by different colors, icons, etc.) helps to anticipate what to expect in the panel, however that requires a cognitive effort to process the information and make a decision.
- **Allow filtering specific kinds of notifications.** If distracting notifications are of a given type or from a specific origin, we can rely on mechanisms of volume control (T115264) or settings (T114917) for the user to filter them. This provides a greater degree of control but also require a bigger effort from the user. Before providing such tools, we may want to explore which are the most useful defaults.
In the current context it may make sense to focus on solutions which are simple (don't introduce new elements to be learnt), and reduce the distraction but still surface external notifications. Some rationale:
- Currently our data about the volume of [[ https://gist.github.com/catrope/0302a3c346571d4edd01 | notifications from different wikis ]] and [[ https://github.com/neilpquinn/2016-02-notifications-exploration/blob/master/Notifications%20research.ipynb | notifications per user ]] seems to be relatively low. So we should not assume a big torrent of interruptions by tenths of wikis.
- Users come from a completely isolated model where there was no visibility on what was going on in other wikis (except for actively looking for it or through email notifications). We may need to evaluate how often this connection across wikis is navigated or the one-wiki-at-a-time model persists.
# Proposed approach
Based on the aboveinitial exploration (T131234), a good step to reduce distractions by cross-wiki notifications would be to **count notifications globally but don't highlight on new cross-wiki notifications**. It seems that the main distraction is produced by the highlighting of the notification badge (which is the aspect aimed at attracting the user attention). In this way, It seems that the main distraction is produced by the highlighting of the notification badge (which is the aspect aimed at attracting the user attentionthe badge will react to the notification bundle as if it was a single notification (while still providing the global count of notifications).
In order to make cross-wiki notifications more noticeable when they are more relevant we can consider some exceptions that avoid them to go completely unnoticed. Some ideas:
- Highlight the badge when a single cross-wiki notification arrives. The first time a cross-wiki notification arrives it will demand the user attention but if the user ignores it, other cross-wiki notifications won't highlight the badge.
- Highlighting the badge for cross-wiki notifications if there are no other unread notifications from the current wiki. In that way, local notifications are given priority in highlighting.
This is an initial proposal for discussion based on the information we have.
It may be good to keep collecting feedback while the tool is n beta and observe how it is used by users, before moving forward.