A while back I did some mockups for ideas related to bubble up notifications, I was cleaning out some files in my design folder and saw them, so I figured I’d share.

Notification Area Bubble Up

This was to demonstrate how notifications can bubble out of an item in the notification area. This is a notification that requires interaction before it disappears, the user must click the [OK] button for this to clear.

Launchers responsible for their notifications

So taking the idea a little further I went for notifications where the launcher of the application was responsible for providing the notifications coming from the application. I was hoping this provided a better alignment between the mental models of the application, it’s launcher, and it’s notifications to the user.

If there were a queue of notifications for this application they would all remain bound to the launcher and history would be available via a context menu. I left out the image where I tried to show in the icon that the application was active, the idea still needs work.

Slight Fade In and Fade Out of Notification

Then I did a quick animation to show how a typical notification might appear and disapear. Note that the bubble doesn’t just appear, it has a slight fade in, which is quicker and less noticible than the fade out. In my sketch I made it grow out of the launcher, however it became too difficult for me to show it in The GIMP.

Thanks to the work of our next-generation x.org all stars, (owen, soren, and carl) who we are calling “The X-Men“, the design collective at Red Hat is constantly being asked to show more cool ways things like composite and transparency could be used. I have a cool app switching sketch drawn up right now, but I need to convert it to the computer before I can share.

Note: Just because this is about notifications and a notification system was proposed for inclusion in GNOME does not mean I approve that implementation or specification.