Last modified: 2014-08-14 14:22:19 UTC
Created attachment 12183 [details] Screenshot of an individual Echo notification from mediawiki.org's Special:Notifications Echo notifications should have a larger clickable surface area. I'm going to upload a screenshot with comment 0 and expand on my views in comment 1.
Looking at attachment 12183 [details], we have three links: * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Steven_%28WMF%29 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_talk:MZMcBride * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_talk:MZMcBride#Productization_vs._Integration In my mind, the most important link for a notification of this type is the third link (an anchored link to the discussion of which the user was notified). However, in the current design, this link is behind an arrow icon ("→"), which I think is fairly obscure. We should consider making the entire grey box a clickable surface area that links directly to the relevant talk page section. This should be considered for both Special:Notifications and the Echo notifications menu. A larger surface area makes it much easier for users to view what the notification relates to, particularly on touchscreen devices (there's really no chance in hell that I'm going to be able to click the "→" link on an iPad). My recommendation would be to remove the arrow altogether and leave only the section name. I also would leave the other two links and have them take precedence over the larger underlying grey blob link (if that makes sense).
Hi MZ, we would like to get more community feedback on the question of how many links to include in the notifications that appear in the flyout and the archive page. There are good arguments for and against having a single link per notification. For now, we have implemented it differently on the flyout (only one link) and on the archive page (several links), so that community members can compare these two approaches easily. This is also consistent with the way other top sites like Facebook have solved this issue: on FB, the flyout has a single link, but it has multiple links on their archive page. This is a tough issue to solve. For experienced users, having multiple links is beneficial, because it gives them more flexibility. For new users, a single link is preferrable, because it doesn't force them to make a decision. Also, for some notifications, it is not always obvious which single link is most useful to all user groups. For example, the Thanks notification takes you to the diff page, but one could make a reasonable argument that linking to the user page of the person who thanked you could lead to a more constructive interaction than just going back to the edit you previously made. For all those reasons, we would like to punt on this issue, and make a decision in a few weeks, after we've heard from both new and experienced users. Thanks for your understanding.
I'm not sure that directly addresses the issue MZ is discussing. We actually considered making entire notifications clickable, but since there were other links in the notices, we thought this would be a bit confusing. The alternative idea was to have a prominent button in each notification that links to the most important/logical destination. However since some notifications have two equally important links (or theoretically no links), there isn't any way we could make this make this consistent across all notifications. My personal suggestion for fixing this issue (and several others) would be to have a separate flyout just for talk page notifications (with a separate badge next to 'Talk') and put buttons on them for going directly to the sections.
Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Mingle card https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/flow/cards/205
The items in the flyout are clickable in their entirety.
