<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.3.0"> </HEAD> <BODY> On Wed, 2004-09-15 at 21:30 -0700, Christian Hammond wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> The specification is currently available at: <A HREF="http://galago.sourceforge.net/notification-spec/">http://galago.sourceforge.net/notification-spec/</A> </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> I guess I have a couple of concerns about this since the spec incorporates pieces that may shape how the notification system interacts with the users.  And I'd like to say that I think you guys are great for doing this work, not trying to be critical of your efforts here. Notification Types and Urgency Levels are the two sections that I'm concerned about. Perhaps I don't understand it fully, but I don't see the clear idea behind Notification Types maybe you could clear this up for me.  I see that it is in reference to allowing groupings of notification types, what is the end user visible goal of the groupings of notifications via type?  Are you expecting lots of notifications from different applications of the same type at the same time? (i.e. running thunderbird and evolution at the same time and coalescing the new message notifications into single popups?)  I'm not sure about this idea yet so I'd appreciate some clarification of how you think this is going to help users. Urgency Levels is the section that is the most concerning from my point of view.  What do Low, Medium, High, and Critical mean to the end user?  I can see how there is the critical "Your computer is on fire!", and low "Joe Bob signed on", however I don't see where the others can fit into place.  I've been working for a while to compile all the information on status notifications in order to write a decent HIG recommendation on notifications and so far what I've come up with is that there are two types of this style notifications.     1) Requires Interaction from the user     2) Has the possibility for interaction from the user Beyond these two types there isn't much else that users are concerned with and by giving developers choice over more options that they expect the user will understand is going to create confusion.  Let me explain the two types.  (1) probably maps to the Critical level you already have, basically the user needs to acknowledge the notification in order for it to go away.  (2) is a notification that can just be a status update, however it always includes the possibility for the user to interact with the information.  These status messages may go away on their own after a certain period of time without user interaction, but they always include the ability for users to interact with them.  Note that I purposely didn't include a "Require no interaction from the user", because these types of notifications are a true mistake in interfaces.  As a rule of thumb you should never just pop up message to the user informing them of something without giving them options of interacting with the information you're presenting; it just becomes added noise. Cheers, ~ Bryan </BODY> </HTML>