I originally posted this on the new notification blog, but that is a closed blog, so I thought I would post it here in addition for more people to see:
I have been thinking about how to "fix" the new notification scheme. From what I have read on this and the other board, it seems that:
Quora thinks having Priority Notifications will be useful for some users.
Some users want all their interactions with Notifications to be handled from the "drop down" window you get when you click on the Notification button in the header. They did not like having to open a new All Notifications tab in their browser to handle notifications.
Some users also want to quickly deal with notifications in a way similar to the old scheme where they could dismiss three at a time.
I think I have come up with a scheme that satisfies all these requirements!
New Notification Drop-Down UI:
The following picture is a crude cartoon of this scheme:
As can be seen in this picture, each individual notification will have a "Mark Read" button. Each time that button is clicked, that notification will "disappear" because it will move down to the read block of notifications that may not be visible on this screen. If the notification that is "Marked Read" was a priority notification, the priority tag will be removed when it moves from the unread block to the read block. The list of notifications below the one that was "Marked Read" will scroll up to take it's place and the mouse cursor will already be in the perfect location to click again to dismiss the next notification. So as fast as you can read and click you can eliminate the notifications - no mouse movements required! (Also on each of the "read" notifications please also include a "Mark Unread" button so you can correct an accidental "Mark Read" click.)
So in this picture I drew you can see that there is only one priority (unread) notification (note the green "priority" indicator). That priority notification is new and there is one new non-priority (unread) notification. There are also additional non-new, non-priority (unread) notifications (there are a total of 25 unread notifications as shown in the header).
Notification Sort Order:
The key idea in this new scheme is that Priority notifications will be "mixed" in with regular notifications but they will always be sorted to the front of the queue. The other new idea is that the unread notifications will always be sorted before the read notifications.
In particular the queue of notifications shown in the drop down window (or the full page "All Notification window) will always be sorted in the following order:
All unread notifications will be in front of all read notifications.
Within the unread notification block, all priority notifications will be in front of all non-priority notifications
Within each of these the unread priority/non-priority blocks the notifications will be sorted in the current chronological order with newest notifications at the top. Thus all "New" notifications will be in front of "old" notifications.
To clarify the overall sorting order of notifications, see this picture:
(The "..." notifications are always in reverse chronological order within the indicated block.)
Referring again to the first picture of the drop down notification window: If the user wants to save some notifications to handle later, they can scroll those unread notifications up and handle any or all of the other notifications (by clicking "Mark Read") below the ones he wants to save.
If the user really trusts the Quora priority scheme, they could just scroll the list down until the green "Priority" flag is no longer appearing on the notifications. At that point the user will know that they have seen all the priority notifications so they can mark all notifications as read if they never want to see the non-priority notifications. More cautious users can continue scrolling until all the unread non-priority notifications has been seen before marking all notifications as read.
To actually open and interact with the notification in a window, the user clicks on the notification itself which causes a new tab to open with the answer/question/blog post in the tab. This will also cause the notification to be "Marked Read" and to move that notification down into the read notification block. This full notification window for a particular notification will have the usual "Next <of this type> Notification" button. This Next button should go through the notifications in the sort order shown in the drop down notification window. In particular notifications above the notification clicked will remain unvisited and unread. To really "Next" through all notifications, the user should always click on the first notification of this window. Maybe when the last notification of the type is reached, the user is given a choice to go back to the first unread notification of that type?
Notification Subtypes:
In the left top corner of the drop down window, the user can click the "All Notifications 25 V" button to cause a drop-down list of subtypes to "Filter" the notifications shown in this drop down window. (The "V" is meant to indicate this will cause a drop down menu to appear.) In this subtype menu the total number of unread notifications will appear after each subtype. If a subtype is chosen, the notification drop down window will repopulate with only that subtype of notifications - still in the sort order shown above. The upper left button will be labelled "<Subtype> NN V", where the NN indicates the number of unread notifications of the subtype. The upper right button will be relabelled "Mark <Subtype> As Read".
The user can still click on the "View All Notifications" link in the footer of the drop down notification window to open a new tab that will be similar to the current scheme except that priority will be mixed in with non-priority - but again with priority always sorted to the top of the list of unread notifications.
If anything is unclear, please leave a comment and I will update this post.