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I'm not convinced. Most of the argument seems to be that redundant UX is bad UX: > But by archiving the email, the email disappears from the list, which alread

I'm not convinced. Most of the argument seems to be that redundant UX is bad UX: > But by archiving the email, the email disappears from the list, which already implies the action was successful. > In this example, the button already includes a confirmation so the toast is entirely unnecessary. I vehemently disagree with the idea that just because you're already communicating something one way it's bad UX to include another way of communicating the same thing at the same time. Redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug, and it's present in all human languages. It ensures that even in less than ideal conditions the message still gets through. In the case of toasts, having a single, standardized way of communicating the status of all actions (and if possible providing the undo) allows a user to quickly pick up on the pattern. Extra indicators closer to the action can be valuable too, but it's when they're paired with the toast that their meaning becomes entirely clear. To remove the toast in favor of a bunch of specific indicators is to force your user to learn several different ways of saying "it's done now" entirely from context (many of which will be small and subtle as in the examples given). This might work fine for you and me but isn't great for, say, the elderly or the vision impaired or children. Unless they're actually getting in the way, toasts aren't bad UX, they're redundant UX, and a UX designer shouldn't be striving to optimize away redundancy.

cupantae 2y ago
I agree. In the first example, you would assume the action completed even if you missed the toast. But in case you did notice it, that gives you a confirmation. Suboptimal? Maybe. But the proposed solution is clearly worse, unless the loading circle turns into a tick to show completion
cowsandmilk 2y ago
The unfortunate thing is they aren’t communicating the same thing. Taking the YouTube example, the checkboxes are 100% optimistic while the toast notification indicates that the request to the backend that was fired off asynchronously was successful. With the archive message example, it is the same thing. The message is removed from the list optimistically and the toast message is representing that the message was actually archived. I would much rather only get the toast if there is a failure to commit the change. Generally, them flashing up is a distraction from what I’m trying to accomplish. And being far on the screen from where I’m taking an action makes them even more of a distraction.
- lolinder 2y ago
  I disagree on that—in the YouTube example specifically this isn't necessarily a problem, but the toast serves a valuable purpose in the archive in that it tells you again which button it was that you pressed. There have been countless times in cases like that where the toast has saved me and allowed me to undo a misclick. I can see the argument that there are certain places where people use toasts that are unnecessary and provide information that the user doesn't need. But that's not the same thing as toasts being bad UX in the general case.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    Toasts also give you a good place to put other shortcuts like “Item updated. [View item]” that make it much easier to act on state changes, like navigate to sensible places to view / react to those changes.
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      All of that is inacessible.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        How so?
        jdiff 2y ago
        Screen reader's probably not going to catch a transient element unless you just happen to stumble across it within that narrow window. Slow reader for whatever reason? Hope you don't take too long, or hope that toast wasn't actually important/actionable for you.
        jkaptur 2y ago
        The spec has an answer for the "transient element" issue: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Live_Regions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A.... Of course, this doesn't eliminate the possibility of bad UX.
the_other 2y ago
I use a computer mainly by using a zoom tool to magnify the area around my text and mouse/finger cursoe. I miss almosst all toasts and most notifications because they not where I’m working. For my use case, feed near the item I’m interacting with is the only valuable feedback.
- kaoD 2y ago
  I assume you don't want a full screen reader if you're not already using one, but if toasts are properly implemented (big if), screen readers can actually present them accessibly via the ARIA alert pattern[0]. Wanted to mention in case you're not aware and maybe there's some tool somewhere (or some way to configure a screen reader?) so that you can keep your simple zoom workflow but still benefit from the ARIA alert pattern. [0] https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/alert/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/alert/
  - mceachen 2y ago
    Thanks for this! I visited your link and hadn’t seen such a nice demo with working code on w3.org before: whoever worked on these pages deserves kudos.
- latexr 2y ago
  None of that invalidates what your parent comment is saying. They’re not saying you should use toasts to the detriment of other options, but in addition to them. If anything, your comment reinforces the notion that redundant information is beneficial because you don’t know where the user is looking.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Yes. For example: while OP uses a magnifier, lots of other people use a screen reader. "Loading indicator disappeared" is a tricky thing to communicate clearly with audio. "Toast: save successful" is trivial.
    - 2y ago
dkarl 2y ago
I think the suggested improvement clarifies what he means: if you're worried that the UI element the user is interacting with doesn't fully convey what's happening, then improve that element rather than adding a second element that divides the user's attention and challenges them to read quickly and make the connection themselves. Communicate the failure of their interaction in the context of the element they interacted with, so the connection is clear. A toast makes sense as a worst-case, last-gasp, no-context attempt to communicate with a user. In this example, if the user unchecked a playlist and dismissed the list of playlists while the save was happening, and then the save failed, a toast makes sense because the context of the action is gone. Might as well put the information at a random spot on the screen. Even then, a toast probably isn't the best you can do, if you really want the user to understand the error. In a the-user-is-the-product adware application like YouTube, you probably don't care if the user misses errors like these (and might even prefer that they do), but in a business application you wouldn't want to gamble on the user missing the toast or confusing it with a different error. It might be more helpful for a normal user if you re-open the element and show them the error in context. Open up the list of playlists and animate something to draw their attention to the fact that their change didn't save. I'm probably getting pie in the sky here, because that sounds really difficult to do in a systematic way, but in an ideal world, you'd always see errors in context.
- lolinder 2y ago
  I get what they were saying and agree that in-context feedback should be added wherever possible. I just disagree that leaving off the toast is (in the cases cited) valuable. Taking the archive example: yes, the disappearing message successfully indicates that something happened. But it doesn't tell you if the message was deleted or archived, and misclicks are common. The toast unambiguously communicates what happened in addition to saying that something happened. Additionally, I stand by my argument that consistency is valuable. By all means have in-context feedback, but also pick a standard way that you always use to communicate completion of all actions. It makes it a lot easier to understand and eventually make use of the in-context feedback which may not be as intuitive as you think it is.
  - 2y ago
arcbyte 2y ago
Have you worked with an old person? Redundancy in UX confuses them. The closer you can get to the whole UI being a single sentence and two buttons the better.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Yes. And I've never once run into issues with redundancy of information being a problem. It's the clever things people do to hide information or to be concise that reliably get them confused. > The closer you can get to the whole UI being a single sentence and two buttons the better. Sure, but this is kind of my point—clever UX tricks to communicate things without words don't work for them. A toast is valuable for the tech-illiterate precisely because it uses English text to communicate its point, and having it exist in the same spot for every action makes it easier for them to pick up. It's not the be-all end-all of UX design for the elderly, but it's a heck of a lot better than the alternatives proposed in TFA.
- Sakos 2y ago
  Have you? Things disappearing with insufficient explicit feedback for what actually happened to the things is one of the most common issues I've encountered with older computer users. I think it's the most common issue. Toasts add persistency and visibility for users who barely or don't understand the UIs they're interacting with, which makes it easier to understand what happened. If Outlook gave feedback to every user action in a toast, then provided a universal history of every toast, you would probably resolve a significant amount of issues caused by user actions leading to unintended changes (and being unable to recognize that the action lead to a particular change, or even how the current state differs from the previous one).
  - jimmygrapes 2y ago
    If Outlook showed a toast for every action I take, I would immediately do everything in my power to make it stop, up to and including hermitage.
  - digging 2y ago
    > If Outlook gave feedback to every user action in a toast, then provided a universal history of every toast This is what message feeds are for. Toasts are just a worse implementation of message/notification feeds.
soneca 2y ago
> ” Redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug” I completely agree with you. The article kind of confirmed to me that toasts are good UX.
cynicalpeace 2y ago
I totally agree with you... this is why Java being so verbose is actually not terrible either, lmao come after me
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Honestly I think the perennial "Java is too verbose" complaints are completely overblown, and say more bad about the person complaining than the language.
nkozyra 2y ago
> redundant UX is bad UX In general, I think the best use of toasts are to present options for further action (if needed). Take the example of deleting an email and getting a toast that lets you undo. Your action has already been completed and you can see it. But you have more context that can be acted on. In this case it's not redundant, even though it relays the action you just take. In this scenario, it's ideal to move this away from the viewport the user was in. In most cases, they don't need it. But if they do, it's onscreen. Simple confirmations that do nothing else are redundant. But toasts don't have to be used that way.
adamc 2y ago
No, they're bad. Messages that are on the periphery of my vision/attention (imagine a widescreen monitor) are actively confusing. I'm working on THIS problem here and something flashes up over there. Half the time, as I refocus to read this annoying intrusion, it disappears. It's bad UX. Put your damned messages where my attention has already been directed to BY YOUR UI.
- berkes 2y ago
  Yes! The problem isn't duplication of the message, nor is it that they convey slightly different things. The main problem is their lack of locality. We can have an indicator, then some icon or even a green bar in the "save this" modal, just fine. Or we can make the "archive" icon color different, or add an error, an undo-button, or other message next to it if we really need to convey this information. This could be a tooltip, something in the icon-bar, or anything really: as long as it right at the place where I made the change and expected the change to show up.
- nativeit 2y ago
  The inevitable tradeoff here is having a somewhat standardized location for notifications versus allowing them to appear arbitrarily determined by the developer’s notion of where they are ostensibly drawing your attention. Maybe that’s worthwhile, but I think there are going to be a lot of cases where the ideal location is ambiguous, or where devs have an idea for where your attention will be that’s not always correct, or where bad actors exploit this flexibility to make it look like something it isn’t in an effort to trick users. I don’t know the right answer to what might be best, but I tend to think that standardized features should be preferred when in doubt.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    It's not standardized. And putting notifications on or right next to a control you're INTERACTING WITH is not "arbitrary" at all; you must be looking at it, because you're using it.
    - brailsafe 2y ago
pc86 2y ago
> > But by archiving the email, the email disappears from the list, which already implies the action was successful. Yeah this in particular bothers me. Someone that knows UI and UX should also know you can absolutely remove something on the front-end without a corresponding action on the back-end. If I click archive and the email disappears, that doesn't mean the back-end call succeeded or has even been made. How many times do you click move/delete/whatever in an app, the thing moves or disappears then a second later pops right back in? These things happen and the subsequent alert that it was actually successful is a good thing in my opinion.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
You missed the main point, which is that the "toast" is nowhere near where you're looking when performing the action.
- lolinder 2y ago
  I didn't miss that point, I'm arguing that that point doesn't prove anything about the merits of a toast. Their examples are all arguments of where local information should have been displayed. I agree with them in general. I just think that a toast should also be displayed in each of the situations they identify. What seems to have happened is that they correctly identified a problem with lack of local information and blamed it on the presence of non-local information, which is fallacious. You can have both, and I believe that a UI with both is generally more usable.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > I just think that a toast should also be displayed As long as it can be disabled. I find toasts to be actively bad and don't want them to happen at all.
savolai 2y ago
As someone with a human-computer interaction degree, this thread deeply saddens me. In general, human-computer interaction is considered a field of computer science, which I guess hn has a good representatin of. And yet the discussion here seems to veer off from actual verification of whether toasts actually work, and all the discussion seems to be purely speculation. Granted, there is general argumentation too that's valid to some degree, and it's good to present that, and at the end of the day the only actual data that can guide this decision for a given user interface comes from user testing that is highly context sensitive. Why? Because there exists no general answer to this question at all. It depends deeply on who your users are, and before the industry understands this basic fact that we as a species are mostly incapable of predicting what different persons from a different user group point of view will be, usability testing will be critically needed, and until we actually start doing it, we will keep creating user interfaces that marginalize everybody but ourselves.
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
With SPAs, stuff happening in your browser doesn't imply any action has been taken on the server. Gmail lets you delete without an internet connection. If it never reconnects before the page is abandoned your changes won't be committed. A toast that is only triggered by a server acknowledgement has value.
jayd16 2y ago
"At best they're redundant" sounds pretty bad to me.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lolinder 2y ago
  You apparently missed the bit where redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug. "It ensures that even in less than ideal conditions the message still gets through."
  - jayd16 2y ago
    I didn't give it much regard. Toasts ensure nothing as there is no guarantee the user saw them. They are redundant as in superfluous not as in a back up.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>Redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug Too much junk information trains users to ignore them, which leads to hilarity ensuing if there also is valuable information every once in a while. Moral is don't send information to a user if it's not strictly necessary. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation

cupantae 2y ago

I agree. In the first example, you would assume the action completed even if you missed the toast. But in case you did notice it, that gives you a confirmation. Suboptimal? Maybe. But the proposed solution is clearly worse, unless the loading circle turns into a tick to show completion

cowsandmilk 2y ago

The unfortunate thing is they aren’t communicating the same thing. Taking the YouTube example, the checkboxes are 100% optimistic while the toast notification indicates that the request to the backend that was fired off asynchronously was successful. With the archive message example, it is the same thing. The message is removed from the list optimistically and the toast message is representing that the message was actually archived. I would much rather only get the toast if there is a failure to commit the change. Generally, them flashing up is a distraction from what I’m trying to accomplish. And being far on the screen from where I’m taking an action makes them even more of a distraction.

lolinder 2y ago
I disagree on that—in the YouTube example specifically this isn't necessarily a problem, but the toast serves a valuable purpose in the archive in that it tells you again which button it was that you pressed. There have been countless times in cases like that where the toast has saved me and allowed me to undo a misclick. I can see the argument that there are certain places where people use toasts that are unnecessary and provide information that the user doesn't need. But that's not the same thing as toasts being bad UX in the general case.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Toasts also give you a good place to put other shortcuts like “Item updated. [View item]” that make it much easier to act on state changes, like navigate to sensible places to view / react to those changes.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    All of that is inacessible.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      How so?
      - jdiff 2y ago
        Screen reader's probably not going to catch a transient element unless you just happen to stumble across it within that narrow window. Slow reader for whatever reason? Hope you don't take too long, or hope that toast wasn't actually important/actionable for you.
        jkaptur 2y ago
        The spec has an answer for the "transient element" issue: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Live_Regions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A.... Of course, this doesn't eliminate the possibility of bad UX.

the_other 2y ago

I use a computer mainly by using a zoom tool to magnify the area around my text and mouse/finger cursoe. I miss almosst all toasts and most notifications because they not where I’m working. For my use case, feed near the item I’m interacting with is the only valuable feedback.

kaoD 2y ago
I assume you don't want a full screen reader if you're not already using one, but if toasts are properly implemented (big if), screen readers can actually present them accessibly via the ARIA alert pattern[0]. Wanted to mention in case you're not aware and maybe there's some tool somewhere (or some way to configure a screen reader?) so that you can keep your simple zoom workflow but still benefit from the ARIA alert pattern. [0] https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/alert/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/alert/
- mceachen 2y ago
  Thanks for this! I visited your link and hadn’t seen such a nice demo with working code on w3.org before: whoever worked on these pages deserves kudos.
latexr 2y ago
None of that invalidates what your parent comment is saying. They’re not saying you should use toasts to the detriment of other options, but in addition to them. If anything, your comment reinforces the notion that redundant information is beneficial because you don’t know where the user is looking.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Yes. For example: while OP uses a magnifier, lots of other people use a screen reader. "Loading indicator disappeared" is a tricky thing to communicate clearly with audio. "Toast: save successful" is trivial.
  - 2y ago

dkarl 2y ago

I think the suggested improvement clarifies what he means: if you're worried that the UI element the user is interacting with doesn't fully convey what's happening, then improve that element rather than adding a second element that divides the user's attention and challenges them to read quickly and make the connection themselves. Communicate the failure of their interaction in the context of the element they interacted with, so the connection is clear. A toast makes sense as a worst-case, last-gasp, no-context attempt to communicate with a user. In this example, if the user unchecked a playlist and dismissed the list of playlists while the save was happening, and then the save failed, a toast makes sense because the context of the action is gone. Might as well put the information at a random spot on the screen. Even then, a toast probably isn't the best you can do, if you really want the user to understand the error. In a the-user-is-the-product adware application like YouTube, you probably don't care if the user misses errors like these (and might even prefer that they do), but in a business application you wouldn't want to gamble on the user missing the toast or confusing it with a different error. It might be more helpful for a normal user if you re-open the element and show them the error in context. Open up the list of playlists and animate something to draw their attention to the fact that their change didn't save. I'm probably getting pie in the sky here, because that sounds really difficult to do in a systematic way, but in an ideal world, you'd always see errors in context.

lolinder 2y ago
I get what they were saying and agree that in-context feedback should be added wherever possible. I just disagree that leaving off the toast is (in the cases cited) valuable. Taking the archive example: yes, the disappearing message successfully indicates that something happened. But it doesn't tell you if the message was deleted or archived, and misclicks are common. The toast unambiguously communicates what happened in addition to saying that something happened. Additionally, I stand by my argument that consistency is valuable. By all means have in-context feedback, but also pick a standard way that you always use to communicate completion of all actions. It makes it a lot easier to understand and eventually make use of the in-context feedback which may not be as intuitive as you think it is.
- 2y ago

arcbyte 2y ago

Have you worked with an old person? Redundancy in UX confuses them. The closer you can get to the whole UI being a single sentence and two buttons the better.

lolinder 2y ago
Yes. And I've never once run into issues with redundancy of information being a problem. It's the clever things people do to hide information or to be concise that reliably get them confused. > The closer you can get to the whole UI being a single sentence and two buttons the better. Sure, but this is kind of my point—clever UX tricks to communicate things without words don't work for them. A toast is valuable for the tech-illiterate precisely because it uses English text to communicate its point, and having it exist in the same spot for every action makes it easier for them to pick up. It's not the be-all end-all of UX design for the elderly, but it's a heck of a lot better than the alternatives proposed in TFA.
Sakos 2y ago
Have you? Things disappearing with insufficient explicit feedback for what actually happened to the things is one of the most common issues I've encountered with older computer users. I think it's the most common issue. Toasts add persistency and visibility for users who barely or don't understand the UIs they're interacting with, which makes it easier to understand what happened. If Outlook gave feedback to every user action in a toast, then provided a universal history of every toast, you would probably resolve a significant amount of issues caused by user actions leading to unintended changes (and being unable to recognize that the action lead to a particular change, or even how the current state differs from the previous one).
- jimmygrapes 2y ago
  If Outlook showed a toast for every action I take, I would immediately do everything in my power to make it stop, up to and including hermitage.
- digging 2y ago
  > If Outlook gave feedback to every user action in a toast, then provided a universal history of every toast This is what message feeds are for. Toasts are just a worse implementation of message/notification feeds.

soneca 2y ago

> ” Redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug” I completely agree with you. The article kind of confirmed to me that toasts are good UX.

cynicalpeace 2y ago

I totally agree with you... this is why Java being so verbose is actually not terrible either, lmao come after me

bigstrat2003 2y ago
Honestly I think the perennial "Java is too verbose" complaints are completely overblown, and say more bad about the person complaining than the language.

nkozyra 2y ago

> redundant UX is bad UX In general, I think the best use of toasts are to present options for further action (if needed). Take the example of deleting an email and getting a toast that lets you undo. Your action has already been completed and you can see it. But you have more context that can be acted on. In this case it's not redundant, even though it relays the action you just take. In this scenario, it's ideal to move this away from the viewport the user was in. In most cases, they don't need it. But if they do, it's onscreen. Simple confirmations that do nothing else are redundant. But toasts don't have to be used that way.

adamc 2y ago

No, they're bad. Messages that are on the periphery of my vision/attention (imagine a widescreen monitor) are actively confusing. I'm working on THIS problem here and something flashes up over there. Half the time, as I refocus to read this annoying intrusion, it disappears. It's bad UX. Put your damned messages where my attention has already been directed to BY YOUR UI.

berkes 2y ago
Yes! The problem isn't duplication of the message, nor is it that they convey slightly different things. The main problem is their lack of locality. We can have an indicator, then some icon or even a green bar in the "save this" modal, just fine. Or we can make the "archive" icon color different, or add an error, an undo-button, or other message next to it if we really need to convey this information. This could be a tooltip, something in the icon-bar, or anything really: as long as it right at the place where I made the change and expected the change to show up.
nativeit 2y ago
The inevitable tradeoff here is having a somewhat standardized location for notifications versus allowing them to appear arbitrarily determined by the developer’s notion of where they are ostensibly drawing your attention. Maybe that’s worthwhile, but I think there are going to be a lot of cases where the ideal location is ambiguous, or where devs have an idea for where your attention will be that’s not always correct, or where bad actors exploit this flexibility to make it look like something it isn’t in an effort to trick users. I don’t know the right answer to what might be best, but I tend to think that standardized features should be preferred when in doubt.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  It's not standardized. And putting notifications on or right next to a control you're INTERACTING WITH is not "arbitrary" at all; you must be looking at it, because you're using it.
  - brailsafe 2y ago

pc86 2y ago

> > But by archiving the email, the email disappears from the list, which already implies the action was successful. Yeah this in particular bothers me. Someone that knows UI and UX should also know you can absolutely remove something on the front-end without a corresponding action on the back-end. If I click archive and the email disappears, that doesn't mean the back-end call succeeded or has even been made. How many times do you click move/delete/whatever in an app, the thing moves or disappears then a second later pops right back in? These things happen and the subsequent alert that it was actually successful is a good thing in my opinion.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

You missed the main point, which is that the "toast" is nowhere near where you're looking when performing the action.

lolinder 2y ago
I didn't miss that point, I'm arguing that that point doesn't prove anything about the merits of a toast. Their examples are all arguments of where local information should have been displayed. I agree with them in general. I just think that a toast should also be displayed in each of the situations they identify. What seems to have happened is that they correctly identified a problem with lack of local information and blamed it on the presence of non-local information, which is fallacious. You can have both, and I believe that a UI with both is generally more usable.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > I just think that a toast should also be displayed As long as it can be disabled. I find toasts to be actively bad and don't want them to happen at all.

savolai 2y ago

As someone with a human-computer interaction degree, this thread deeply saddens me. In general, human-computer interaction is considered a field of computer science, which I guess hn has a good representatin of. And yet the discussion here seems to veer off from actual verification of whether toasts actually work, and all the discussion seems to be purely speculation. Granted, there is general argumentation too that's valid to some degree, and it's good to present that, and at the end of the day the only actual data that can guide this decision for a given user interface comes from user testing that is highly context sensitive. Why? Because there exists no general answer to this question at all. It depends deeply on who your users are, and before the industry understands this basic fact that we as a species are mostly incapable of predicting what different persons from a different user group point of view will be, usability testing will be critically needed, and until we actually start doing it, we will keep creating user interfaces that marginalize everybody but ourselves.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

With SPAs, stuff happening in your browser doesn't imply any action has been taken on the server. Gmail lets you delete without an internet connection. If it never reconnects before the page is abandoned your changes won't be committed. A toast that is only triggered by a server acknowledgement has value.

jayd16 2y ago

"At best they're redundant" sounds pretty bad to me.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lolinder 2y ago
You apparently missed the bit where redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug. "It ensures that even in less than ideal conditions the message still gets through."
- jayd16 2y ago
  I didn't give it much regard. Toasts ensure nothing as there is no guarantee the user saw them. They are redundant as in superfluous not as in a back up.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>Redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug Too much junk information trains users to ignore them, which leads to hilarity ensuing if there also is valuable information every once in a while. Moral is don't send information to a user if it's not strictly necessary. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation