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The current UX of notifications is terrible. After months of using it I still don't understand the mental model. A notification comes up, I hover and wait for t

The current UX of notifications is terrible. After months of using it I still don't understand the mental model. A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it. But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparantly all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups. Somehow Apple took a UX flow that was fine and made something that regularly makes me feel stupid because I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to make it behave in a way that makes sense. Notifications are such a simple thing, but they somehow made them complex.

latexr 5y ago
> I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it. If you’re manually dismissing every notification, consider going to your System Preferences and changing the notification type for those apps. > all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups. Last I checked notifications over a week old are auto-cleared, so ignore the cleanup and only open Notification Centre when you need to check on a previous notification.
endofreach 5y ago
As much as i am with you on this, i must say it‘s pretty good for someone like me. I usually swipe notifications away. Then forget about them. Lock the screen and go „ah, damn.“ But obviously, this shouldn‘t be forced on normal people. Apple has lost what they had.
gcanyon 5y ago
For me the issue is notifications that appear, then disappear, and I can’t find them again, or what they refer to. If it’s important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc. I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.
- have_faith 5y ago
  This happens to me a lot. Somehow I miss the initial notification but catch it as it animates away and I don't know how to find out what it was or what app caused it.
- scalar42 5y ago
  The notification history feature does exist, on Android (11 I'm using). It can show you both the recently dismissed notifications and the ones in the last 24 hours, grouping by apps.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  > I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it. Yeah, same here.
  - chrisweekly 5y ago
    I'm probably missing context (skimmed comments quickly on phone after a long day), but just in case it helps: on iOS, swipe straight down from the very top to access Notification Center. IME, on iOS, it's a reliable way to access them.
    - Turing_Machine 5y ago
      Thanks --- I did know about that. For whatever reason, though, that doesn't appear to reliably bring back all notifications, only some of them. While I definitely could be wrong, I'm just about 100% certain that I've had notifications come and go that aren't to be found in the Notification Center afterward.
      - asteiger 5y ago
        In the notifications settings/preferences, on a per-app basis, you can set whether notifications are displayed to allow banners, badges, and sounds. And you can turn on/off whether the notification posts to the lock screen, or stay in the notification center (swipe down on iOS, click the clock in the menu bar on OSX)
philg_jr 5y ago
As a new iOS user, this is the #1 thing that makes me want to sell my 12 Mini and go back to vanilla Android. Notifications are a total mess in iOS.
- tomtheelder 5y ago
  Unquestionably it's the biggest gap. Having also switched recently, notifications on iOS feel like stepping literally 10 years into the past.
  - mft_ 5y ago
    I think it’s worse than that. IIRC I had the second model of Android phone ever released in the UK, and even that phone’s notification system was superior to iOS of 2021. I’ve always assumed patents are to blame - I mean, surely no one at Apple uses their iOS notifications and thinks “yes, that system is perfect in every way”? There must be other factors at work?
    - josephg 5y ago
      Can you elaborate? I have an iPhone and notifications seem fine. But I’m probably missing something. I haven’t had an android phone in nearly a decade. What do android notifications do differently and better?
      - mft_ 5y ago
        From memory (my last use of Android it was a long time ago!) it was a combination of two factors: 1) Android's system relied on icons appearing on the bar at the top of the screen (e.g. a mail icon for mail, or a message icon for a text, etc.) - which was both unintrusive, and very quick and practical to check. To check a message, you'd just pull down the menu from that bar, and you'd see your different notifications in more detail, most recent first, and a tap would take you to the app. It was a lovely holistic concept. In contrast, iOS has some aspects of this, but it's not holistic: * Red dots on icons indicate waiting content, but don't reflect when the content is from (unless you're obsessed with clearing all of your red dots - which would be a problem in itself) * The notification center offers a list of notifications, but it's not linked to a visual reminder - you have to remember to check it. * The notification center is shown on the lock screen, but IME it's buggy, not always responsive, and sometimes disappears confusingly. * There are also banners which pop up (and there used to be alerts?) but these aren't connected with the other approaches. TL;DR: Android had a single holistic approach; iOS has a variety of apparently unrelated approaches. 2) When you're using your phone or computer (it happens on MacOS too) many of Apple's notifications distract you and demand your attention or action. This would include banners which hang around obstructing part of your screen and need a swipe to remove them, or alerts which must be interacted with before you can do anything else. I find this a fundamentally user-unfriendly paradigm.
drewg123 5y ago
I wish there was some way to look at the last N notifications, see what apps generated them, etc. My biggest pet peeve right now is that my iPhone bongs when charging. Not when the charger is plugged or unplugged (its a different sound). It seems to happen when the charge passes 20% and then again when it passes 80%. But there is never a notification on screen, just a sound. Googling for this is impossible, since you wind up with a million questions about the sound the phone makes when a charger is plugged in.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I feel like users don't actually want notifications; they want Kafka with a nice UI. On the other hand, developers (and specifically, ones with engagement KPIs) want as disposable notifications as possible.
- laurent92 5y ago
  At 20% iOS deactivates the powersaving mode, I think. At 80% iOS notifies that it is charged enough, so you can unplug if you want to avoid supercharging it.
  - drewg123 5y ago
    Sure, but do you know how can I disable these bings? Or even where to find them in the settings? This is what's impossible to google for... They're incredibly annoying and prevent me from charging my phone when I sleep.
    - concinds 5y ago
      As far as I'm aware there's nothing in the OS that should do that, at least by default. Perhaps an accessibility option. Or your charger is finnicky and somehow disconnects during charging a few times, but you say the sound is different. If you record it, and post it on reddit, they might be able to identify it.
    - pram 5y ago
      The silent mode switch? I’ve never heard them.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app. I used to know how to use it. Now I need to click five times at random to get anywhere, and still don't understand where I am. All the views look similar, but different. I just want to hear the oldest first and see if episodes are downloaded, that's it. Cue… "you had one job!" Yes, been about six months.
- josephg 5y ago
  Try Overcast. It’s one of the best pieces of software on my iPhone. Simple, well thought through and reliable. And the speed controls are the best I’ve seen in any program. It’s the sort of software apple makes when they’re at their best. Much better than the built in podcast app.
  - EricE 5y ago
    The audio controls in Overcast are what made it must-have software for me. I had a few podcasts with audio so bad they were barely listenable that the voice boost function in Overcast was able to make them actually listenable. That and the shorten silence feature combined with the excellent audio processing if you listen at higher speed have allowed me to really optimize my podcast consumption. Highly recommended!
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I like Overcast. Though neither it nor anything else really comes close to letting me play podcasts with some degree of reasonable selection when I'm driving. Maybe too difficult a problem and reflecting that voice assistants are pretty limited.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Hmmm....I was just cursing out Amazon Music for the same podcast flaws. These people.
- Slartie 5y ago
laurent92 5y ago
The new generation (some young employees/interns) are awesome about notifications. I arrive on their screen and tell them they have a notification pending. And then they showed me: They ignore them. Red dot? Ignore. Blinking red dot jumping in the docker? They live with it. They say macOS is terrible because it has red dots, sometimes worse than Windows. One is colorblind which helps, but really, they got used to Windows nagging them, Youtube nagging them, websites where the cookie banner and the consent form. They try to deactivate as many notifications as they can, but they tend to avoid the cross itself, or they avoid clicking on the Slack icon to remove the dot. They just let it jump on the sidebar.
- 3np 5y ago
  A whole generation damaged by data-abuse-consent banners.
crooked-v 5y ago
Also, while this isn't so much a macOS as an iOS thing, there are a huge number of apps that take advantage of wanting functional notifications turned on ("your food has arrived") to constantly spam the user with marketing notifications ("sign up for FoodPass, 50% off!").
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gumby 5y ago
  I hate that! iOS 15 has a way to filter that — you can have a special “focus” that allows notifications for all those abusive companies, which you can enable when expecting a delivery or have made a restaurant reso.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mulmen 5y ago
It's even better that in some cases (calendar invites?) you have to mouse over the notification "x" to see the dropdown to "accept" but if you move your mouse off the "x" then the dropdown disappears!
tailspin2019 5y ago
Same for me. Notifications on macOS weren’t great before but they are way worse now. Before they were an annoyance; but now they’re just utterly baffling to me. I have no idea what I’m supposed to click half the time and they seem to come back randomly for me too.
- sj4nz 5y ago
  The notifications come back in just about the same way the Algorithm scrambles timelines on the social media apps--its just like they're trying to keep you engaged in using the phone. Ideally, the notifications should have two very simple views: a linear list by time, a grouped-by-application list and the ability to mark and sweep them away. Or maybe at the most, an archive all notifications sweep that you can re-open if you remember that you wanted to see an old notification.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
My favorite is how the (idiotically hidden-in-the-first-place) X often gets its state reversed, so it DISappears when you roll over the notification, instead of the opposite... making the thing impossible to dismiss until you jostle it out of its backward state. And if you have multiple notifications, there's no option to dismiss the top one to see what the others are... you have to dismiss them ALL. Fucking retarded.
neilpanchal 5y ago
Facepalm. I noticed that too and ranted about it: https://neil.computer/notes/apple-ux-ui-is-regressing/ https://neil.computer/notes/apple-ux-ui-is-regressing/
- gnicholas 5y ago
  You’ve nailed it. I upgraded from Mojave to Monterey, so I didn’t know when this change kicked in (or if there had been multiple iterations that made the new process more intuitive for users who had upgraded each year). The only thing I’ve learned about dealing with these new notification types is that you can hover over them and swipe left to right to dismiss them. Unfortunately the notification will reappear sometimes. It seems like this happens for calendar notifications but not Messages notifications. Anyone else have tips for how to deal with this? In ready to turn off notifications completely, which is unfortunate because I like to have calendar notifications (but only once).
SkyPuncher 5y ago
I know it's minor, but managing virtual desktops is infuriating. There after I take the two steps necessary to manage virtual desktops (swipe four fingers up and move the mouse to the top of the screen). There are exactly 4 actions I want to take: * Select a desktop (even this is questionable as an action) * Re-arrange a desktop * Add a desktop * Remove a desktop ---- Nearly all of the time, I want to remove a desktop because I have too many of them. I would expect a sane UI where the X button is always shown _and_ deleting a desktop results in a new X in the exact same spot (so I can quickly close multiple desktops). Instead, I have to hover to reveal the x, click it. Everything then shifts to a magic new location where I have to repeat hover, find X, click it. Drives me up the wall.
- gord288 5y ago
  Possibly this is the "Automatically rearrange Spaces..." setting in the Mission Control prefPane?

latexr 5y ago

> I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it. If you’re manually dismissing every notification, consider going to your System Preferences and changing the notification type for those apps. > all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups. Last I checked notifications over a week old are auto-cleared, so ignore the cleanup and only open Notification Centre when you need to check on a previous notification.

endofreach 5y ago

As much as i am with you on this, i must say it‘s pretty good for someone like me. I usually swipe notifications away. Then forget about them. Lock the screen and go „ah, damn.“ But obviously, this shouldn‘t be forced on normal people. Apple has lost what they had.

gcanyon 5y ago

For me the issue is notifications that appear, then disappear, and I can’t find them again, or what they refer to. If it’s important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc. I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.

have_faith 5y ago
This happens to me a lot. Somehow I miss the initial notification but catch it as it animates away and I don't know how to find out what it was or what app caused it.
scalar42 5y ago
The notification history feature does exist, on Android (11 I'm using). It can show you both the recently dismissed notifications and the ones in the last 24 hours, grouping by apps.
Turing_Machine 5y ago
> I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it. Yeah, same here.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  I'm probably missing context (skimmed comments quickly on phone after a long day), but just in case it helps: on iOS, swipe straight down from the very top to access Notification Center. IME, on iOS, it's a reliable way to access them.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    Thanks --- I did know about that. For whatever reason, though, that doesn't appear to reliably bring back all notifications, only some of them. While I definitely could be wrong, I'm just about 100% certain that I've had notifications come and go that aren't to be found in the Notification Center afterward.
    - asteiger 5y ago
      In the notifications settings/preferences, on a per-app basis, you can set whether notifications are displayed to allow banners, badges, and sounds. And you can turn on/off whether the notification posts to the lock screen, or stay in the notification center (swipe down on iOS, click the clock in the menu bar on OSX)

philg_jr 5y ago

As a new iOS user, this is the #1 thing that makes me want to sell my 12 Mini and go back to vanilla Android. Notifications are a total mess in iOS.

tomtheelder 5y ago
Unquestionably it's the biggest gap. Having also switched recently, notifications on iOS feel like stepping literally 10 years into the past.
- mft_ 5y ago
  I think it’s worse than that. IIRC I had the second model of Android phone ever released in the UK, and even that phone’s notification system was superior to iOS of 2021. I’ve always assumed patents are to blame - I mean, surely no one at Apple uses their iOS notifications and thinks “yes, that system is perfect in every way”? There must be other factors at work?
  - josephg 5y ago
    Can you elaborate? I have an iPhone and notifications seem fine. But I’m probably missing something. I haven’t had an android phone in nearly a decade. What do android notifications do differently and better?
    - mft_ 5y ago
      From memory (my last use of Android it was a long time ago!) it was a combination of two factors: 1) Android's system relied on icons appearing on the bar at the top of the screen (e.g. a mail icon for mail, or a message icon for a text, etc.) - which was both unintrusive, and very quick and practical to check. To check a message, you'd just pull down the menu from that bar, and you'd see your different notifications in more detail, most recent first, and a tap would take you to the app. It was a lovely holistic concept. In contrast, iOS has some aspects of this, but it's not holistic: * Red dots on icons indicate waiting content, but don't reflect when the content is from (unless you're obsessed with clearing all of your red dots - which would be a problem in itself) * The notification center offers a list of notifications, but it's not linked to a visual reminder - you have to remember to check it. * The notification center is shown on the lock screen, but IME it's buggy, not always responsive, and sometimes disappears confusingly. * There are also banners which pop up (and there used to be alerts?) but these aren't connected with the other approaches. TL;DR: Android had a single holistic approach; iOS has a variety of apparently unrelated approaches. 2) When you're using your phone or computer (it happens on MacOS too) many of Apple's notifications distract you and demand your attention or action. This would include banners which hang around obstructing part of your screen and need a swipe to remove them, or alerts which must be interacted with before you can do anything else. I find this a fundamentally user-unfriendly paradigm.

drewg123 5y ago

I wish there was some way to look at the last N notifications, see what apps generated them, etc. My biggest pet peeve right now is that my iPhone bongs when charging. Not when the charger is plugged or unplugged (its a different sound). It seems to happen when the charge passes 20% and then again when it passes 80%. But there is never a notification on screen, just a sound. Googling for this is impossible, since you wind up with a million questions about the sound the phone makes when a charger is plugged in.

ethbr0 5y ago
I feel like users don't actually want notifications; they want Kafka with a nice UI. On the other hand, developers (and specifically, ones with engagement KPIs) want as disposable notifications as possible.
laurent92 5y ago
At 20% iOS deactivates the powersaving mode, I think. At 80% iOS notifies that it is charged enough, so you can unplug if you want to avoid supercharging it.
- drewg123 5y ago
  Sure, but do you know how can I disable these bings? Or even where to find them in the settings? This is what's impossible to google for... They're incredibly annoying and prevent me from charging my phone when I sleep.
  - concinds 5y ago
    As far as I'm aware there's nothing in the OS that should do that, at least by default. Perhaps an accessibility option. Or your charger is finnicky and somehow disconnects during charging a few times, but you say the sound is different. If you record it, and post it on reddit, they might be able to identify it.
  - pram 5y ago
    The silent mode switch? I’ve never heard them.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app. I used to know how to use it. Now I need to click five times at random to get anywhere, and still don't understand where I am. All the views look similar, but different. I just want to hear the oldest first and see if episodes are downloaded, that's it. Cue… "you had one job!" Yes, been about six months.

josephg 5y ago
Try Overcast. It’s one of the best pieces of software on my iPhone. Simple, well thought through and reliable. And the speed controls are the best I’ve seen in any program. It’s the sort of software apple makes when they’re at their best. Much better than the built in podcast app.
- EricE 5y ago
  The audio controls in Overcast are what made it must-have software for me. I had a few podcasts with audio so bad they were barely listenable that the voice boost function in Overcast was able to make them actually listenable. That and the shorten silence feature combined with the excellent audio processing if you listen at higher speed have allowed me to really optimize my podcast consumption. Highly recommended!
- ghaff 5y ago
  I like Overcast. Though neither it nor anything else really comes close to letting me play podcasts with some degree of reasonable selection when I'm driving. Maybe too difficult a problem and reflecting that voice assistants are pretty limited.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
datavirtue 5y ago
Hmmm....I was just cursing out Amazon Music for the same podcast flaws. These people.
Slartie 5y ago

laurent92 5y ago

The new generation (some young employees/interns) are awesome about notifications. I arrive on their screen and tell them they have a notification pending. And then they showed me: They ignore them. Red dot? Ignore. Blinking red dot jumping in the docker? They live with it. They say macOS is terrible because it has red dots, sometimes worse than Windows. One is colorblind which helps, but really, they got used to Windows nagging them, Youtube nagging them, websites where the cookie banner and the consent form. They try to deactivate as many notifications as they can, but they tend to avoid the cross itself, or they avoid clicking on the Slack icon to remove the dot. They just let it jump on the sidebar.

3np 5y ago
A whole generation damaged by data-abuse-consent banners.

crooked-v 5y ago

Also, while this isn't so much a macOS as an iOS thing, there are a huge number of apps that take advantage of wanting functional notifications turned on ("your food has arrived") to constantly spam the user with marketing notifications ("sign up for FoodPass, 50% off!").

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gumby 5y ago
I hate that! iOS 15 has a way to filter that — you can have a special “focus” that allows notifications for all those abusive companies, which you can enable when expecting a delivery or have made a restaurant reso.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mulmen 5y ago

It's even better that in some cases (calendar invites?) you have to mouse over the notification "x" to see the dropdown to "accept" but if you move your mouse off the "x" then the dropdown disappears!

tailspin2019 5y ago

Same for me. Notifications on macOS weren’t great before but they are way worse now. Before they were an annoyance; but now they’re just utterly baffling to me. I have no idea what I’m supposed to click half the time and they seem to come back randomly for me too.

sj4nz 5y ago
The notifications come back in just about the same way the Algorithm scrambles timelines on the social media apps--its just like they're trying to keep you engaged in using the phone. Ideally, the notifications should have two very simple views: a linear list by time, a grouped-by-application list and the ability to mark and sweep them away. Or maybe at the most, an archive all notifications sweep that you can re-open if you remember that you wanted to see an old notification.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

My favorite is how the (idiotically hidden-in-the-first-place) X often gets its state reversed, so it DISappears when you roll over the notification, instead of the opposite... making the thing impossible to dismiss until you jostle it out of its backward state. And if you have multiple notifications, there's no option to dismiss the top one to see what the others are... you have to dismiss them ALL. Fucking retarded.

neilpanchal 5y ago

Facepalm. I noticed that too and ranted about it: https://neil.computer/notes/apple-ux-ui-is-regressing/ https://neil.computer/notes/apple-ux-ui-is-regressing/

gnicholas 5y ago
You’ve nailed it. I upgraded from Mojave to Monterey, so I didn’t know when this change kicked in (or if there had been multiple iterations that made the new process more intuitive for users who had upgraded each year). The only thing I’ve learned about dealing with these new notification types is that you can hover over them and swipe left to right to dismiss them. Unfortunately the notification will reappear sometimes. It seems like this happens for calendar notifications but not Messages notifications. Anyone else have tips for how to deal with this? In ready to turn off notifications completely, which is unfortunate because I like to have calendar notifications (but only once).

SkyPuncher 5y ago

I know it's minor, but managing virtual desktops is infuriating. There after I take the two steps necessary to manage virtual desktops (swipe four fingers up and move the mouse to the top of the screen). There are exactly 4 actions I want to take: * Select a desktop (even this is questionable as an action) * Re-arrange a desktop * Add a desktop * Remove a desktop ---- Nearly all of the time, I want to remove a desktop because I have too many of them. I would expect a sane UI where the X button is always shown _and_ deleting a desktop results in a new X in the exact same spot (so I can quickly close multiple desktops). Instead, I have to hover to reveal the x, click it. Everything then shifts to a magic new location where I have to repeat hover, find X, click it. Drives me up the wall.

gord288 5y ago
Possibly this is the "Automatically rearrange Spaces..." setting in the Mission Control prefPane?