Notifications

[Paul-Eraman-CoopCycle]

We have recently made a first attempt to fix administrator notifications.

Previously the situation was that notifications on the administration panel and the orders panel were many different types of actions, many of which were not important during a dispatching shift. When you opened the notification modal, you could only see 5 notifications, and once you saw them you could not hide them from view. At the same time, the activities in the activities page (https://xxx.coopcycle.org/admin/activity) are a slightly different set of actions presented in a different way.

Now, we wanted to make a first step. This meant making it possible for notifications to disappear so that we could use the notifications at all. If they don't disappear, it is completely broken. We agreed to make the technical capacity to remove notifications from the screen, in order to make the usable. This ended in the following feature:

We now show 20 notifications and the notifications modal can scroll. You can trash notifications so that they disappear. There is a link to a page that shows all of the notifications. In this page you can delete 20 notifications at a time, or more if you load the page more then try to delete.

If we really want to make notifications useful, we need to do a few things:

• Understand what is different between notifications and activities
• How to have notifications disappear from view
• What should the notifications page show
• Should notifications "disappear" completely?

Proposed solutions to these doubts by Paul:

1. Ask QA coops what types of actions would a dispatcher want to be alerted to. These are notifications. Everything else is in activities, which is for administrative follow-up
2. Notifications should disappear with a single click, but the interface should mimic closing a task as a courier to maintain UI coherency
3. Notifications page should have all the past notifications (they don't disappear here, just from the modal in the panel)
4. No they shouldn't
5. The notifications page should have infinite scroll, not load only 20 at a time, which currently takes a long time (so we should load more than 20 to begin. If I only wanted 20, i would have stayed on the admin panel)

The green number circle should then be

1. Not green (its an alert!)
2. Have the numbers disappear once you have opened the modal and viewed the notification
3. If you click on the button to see the notifications page, show all past notifications
4. Make a ding sound and maybe a movement when a new notification happens to attract attention to the dispatcher

This is basically how most apps work, so we are just copying this user experience

[0bi0ne1312]

For now, there is so much notifications that I just skip these.
But a noisy and moving notifications on the computer for special infos like new tasks could be interesting to have in the workfloW

[rayon9coop]

Les modifications apportées dernièrement semblent fonctionner comme il faut. En un clic il est possible de faire apparaitre ou disparaitre l'onglet ou encore d'aller dans l'historique des notifications.
Une différenciation des couleurs des lignes et un champ de recherche permettraient de faciliter l'utilisation des notifications à long terme.
La couleur du bouton devrait être grise lorsqu'il n'y a aucune nouvelle notification et verte lorsqu'il y a une notification, est-il possible de le faire rouge lorsqu'il s'agit d'une notification de tâches échouées ? Ceci afin de bien attirer l'oeil des gestionnaires.

The recent changes seem to be working as they should. With a single click, you can make the tab appear or disappear, or go to the notification history.
Differentiated line colors and a search field would make notifications easier to use in the long term.
The color of the button should be gray when there are no new notifications and green when there is a notification; is it possible to make it red when it's a notification of failed tasks? This is to catch the managers' eye.

[fortyoneandahalf]

I feel like different co-ops will probably have different activities that they want to be notified for. For instance, we really don't care when a rider successfully completes a task, that just means there's no problem and the dispatcher doesn't need to do anything. However for food, it might be useful for the dispatcher to be alerted that a rider has finished their delivery and is available for a new one. So I'd suggest that the final goal which we're iterating towards is a system where each co-op can customise which kinds of events they want to see alerts for.

I'm not familiar with exactly which activities can throw notifications, but I think the main one we would want is failed tasks/deliveries.

A button for "Delete All" could be useful for larger co-ops that generate a lot of notifications (and don't manage them consistently...)

The changes already made look good!

[0bi0ne1312]

The improvements are significative, it is better to access these, and infinite scroll is really useful.
But I still don't really understand why activities and notifications are separated, as there are not so different infos... at least from a user/dispatch/courier/admin view...

The idea to have an easy access and view of it is a really good idea too !

In my daily routine as a dispatcher (for example) my use of notifications is mostly because bad habits of the couriers I am working on, so I can keep track of the different moves of the day (but we are working on this problem from the couriers side)
But I prefer to use the activities panel to watch out new orders.

An idea that then came to me, with perhaps not all the infos you have to make the right decision : Why can't the "notifications" be replaced by "activities" and still keep the easy access you made for the "notifications" panel in the first place ?

I hope it will help.