
GitHub's new notifications: a case of regressive design - weinzierl
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/13/GitHub-notifications.html
======
kasbah
I have been using it for a few weeks and really like it actually. It's much
better than Github's old notification system, where I would click on something
that I couldn't resolve there and then, it would get be marked as seen and I
would inevitably forget about it. Now I am in control of what I see as done
and I can easily unsubscribe from things I don't care about without
unsubscribing from a whole project.

I also don't get on with Gitlab's system at all. Haven't tried git.sr.ht but
this new Github design is way better than anything I have used before.

~~~
cltsang
Agree. For me although it's not great as of now, it's already a huge
improvement. I have confidence about my actions now. Notifications can be
located and managed more easily.

It's good enough now for me. I hope they look into Gist next. So many missed
opportunities there. Head over to Show HN and you'll find code snippet
management softwares there from time to time. Almost all problems they are
trying to tackle can be solved by a better GitHub Gist.

------
eatonphil
I sent GitHub my own negative feedback. The worst parts for me are that I get
notified about _my own actions_, and that clicking on the item that the
notification is about doesn't immediately mark it as read/done. I have never
seen an inbox system where clicking on an unread notification didn't
automatically mark it as unread.

Additionally, clicking on "Done" once you're in the notification-specific page
will navigate you away from the current page back to the notifications list.
This is pretty disruptive to me.

Granted, I keep inbox 0 everywhere so my habits may be different than average.

I like that the notifications are removed in realtime from the list if you
click "Read" there. (However, possibly due to varying line lengths, the page
sometimes jumps while marking each item as read in the list. This is
annoying.)

My guess is that the product team had a solid UX in mind but the engineering
team was pushed to release before it was polished enough to be a solid
improvement on the existing system.

~~~
timdorr
> Additionally, clicking on "Done" once you're in the notification-specific
> page will navigate you away from the current page back to the notifications
> list. This is pretty disruptive to me.

But if you're done with that notification, why would you want to stick around?
You wouldn't yet be done by definition.

~~~
eatonphil
I guess that's just not how I think or how I'm used to using an inbox. I click
done to get the banner out of my face. The important part was the notification
not the requirement to buy into their task management system.

~~~
est31
Yeah that banner is annoying and takes away lots of valuable space.

------
Rauchg
> I haven’t spoken to anyone who likes the new UI. Do you?

I've heard many people in our team rave about how the notifications overhaul
has made them far more efficient.

[https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1195176650008252416](https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1195176650008252416)

[https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1194675684020383744](https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1194675684020383744)

~~~
steveklabnik
I haven't heard many things about it, but what I've heard has only been
positive.

------
pythux
I could not really pinpoint why the new UI is bad, but it got me to finally
switched 100% over to emails to manage all my GitHub notifications; I disabled
them in the Web UI completely.

I find my email client (Thunderbird) and custom filters to be a much more
powerful and flexible way to manage the hundreds of notifications I get every
day. More than 99% of these emails are automatically sorted in folders,
tagged, etc. So that I can efficiently prioritize what I look at. This saves
me massive amounts of time. In the end I always have an empty inbox, which I
find pretty satisfying and it helps me focus.

~~~
listsfrin
People with Thunderbird are not their target. They want the Outlook people.

~~~
pythux
Here you go: [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-email-
messag...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-email-messages-by-
using-rules-c24f5dea-9465-4df4-ad17-a50704d66c59)

------
einpoklum
I had tried the beta/preview, and it was terrible.

It was as though they had created a mailbox, and I was looking at a long,
small-font, mailbox message list.

I'm not a design expert, but I felt annoyed and, somehow, a bit confused (?)
...

I don't understand why they would do this. Kind of reminds me of the supreme
folly that is Microsoft's Metro designs.

~~~
yxhuvud
My first reaction was similar to yours, but after using it a few weeks I much
prefer it over the old notifications. Those were _really_ bad. These are
functional and I expect them to be further polished as things go by.

------
jkrems
I've seen a lot of active open source users talk positively about the new
design. I personally disabled email notifications completely and wouldn't want
to go back. Having a clear separation between unread, read, and archived is a
huge step forward.

Also, I'm not sure why it matters to have notifications grouped by repo. At
least for myself it rarely made sense and only wasted space in the UI.

~~~
wildpeaks
For me, grouping by repo was useful because I don't care about every repo
equally: some produce few notifications but are extremely important, while
other repos (that happen to produce a lot of notifications) aren't that
important.

------
jakub_g
Good thing about GitHub is that if you have email notifs enabled, they put a
fake CC in the email

    
    
        {review_requested | author | assign | mention | your_activity | subscribed} @ http://noreply.github.com
    

Then you can create filters in your email client and sort this stuff into
different subfolders.

IMO this is still not enough granular
([https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1222918835172495360](https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1222918835172495360))
but overall it's quite ok. Feel free to ping GH support if you agree with my
tweets so maybe this gets prioritized.

------
di4na
I gave them the same exact feedback a few weeks ago. Got zero follow up so i
suppose it worked for some. I will just stop using notifications i suppose.

------
anonfunction
I agree and sent my own feedback, where before I had one button to click "Mark
all as read" but now it's three clicks and hidden, I actually didn't know it
was possible until just now when I tried it out again.

Also what does "done" even mean? If I'm mentioned in an issue but it's not
closed should I mark it done?

------
mugsie
I think the new one is OK for a quick overview, but I still prefer email.
Sieve + this rule[1] files emails from each repo in a folder (following org
structure), and I can flag things I need to come back to, mark things I don't
care about as read, and have thunderbird pop a notification in the top of my
screen for repos I really care about.

(I know I am definitely not the target audience for the page)

1 -

    
    
      # GitHub
      if allof(exists "X-github-recipient",
               header :regex "List-Id" "<([a-z_0-9-]+)\.([a-z_0-9-]+)[.@]") {
          set :lower "organisation" "${2}";
          set :lower "repo" "${1}";
          fileinto :create "INBOX.GitHub Code Review.${organisation}.${repo}";
          stop;
      }

------
strict9
It is still light years ahead of the slipshod UX of Gitlab.

Gitlab checks off all the feature boxes that managers love to see, but for
devs that use it, it's a disjointed and inconsistent experience compared to
github.

~~~
lbotos
Examples? Would love to get your feedback to our UX team.

~~~
ddevault
For my part, my main complaints with GitLab's UI are:

1) It's too slow. If the same UI were 2x faster it'd be a lot easier to use.

2) It doesn't meet the bare minimum of "at least do something useful" if
JavaScript is turned off

3) Getting around the various tools available for a single repo is difficult

Pot calling the kettle black a bit with that 3rd one, though.

------
Slippery_John
It's been great for me for one major reason: I used to work on a pretty active
project, but have since moved on. I don't have time or energy to look at
things from that project anymore, but notifications from issues I participated
in drown out the things I'm working on now. The new UI lets me bulk
unsubscribe from those issues, which has been great.

Of course, being able to just bulk unsubscribe from an entire project and all
its issues from the outset would be better.

------
jakear
I've been using it for several months now and at first I found it cumbersome
but now its quite nice. Working on a very large OSS project, I end up with
quite a few notifications. I need to be able to work through them and decide
if I want to act now, later, some day, or never. The new system works
perfectly for that. The article's complaints seem to be mainly about the UI/UX
of the project, which IMO is not nearly as important as the Concepts (in the
Jacksonian sense [1]) it empowers. UI/UXs are relatively easy and can
incrementally improve over time. Concepts are difficult and heavy.

Do I have complaints regarding the UI/UX? Of course. But it's beta software,
it would be insane for me not to.

[1] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-
abstractions](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-abstractions)

------
geniium
I haven't been using it myself yet, but this afternoon a colleague just said
"Whoooohaa, the new notifications screen on github's great".

Seems he was very happy to be able to manager his notifications with more
"fine tuning" than before.

And you, what do you think of it?

------
jeremy_k
Where is the sticky header? Scrolling down the page I don't see anything
sticking to the top.

Also I didn't even know where to look to find the page. I guess I relied far
more on checking my email and seeing notifications for things there and then
bouncing over to Github to look at changes. Definitely going to spend a little
more time trying out the notifications.

~~~
jorams
It's on the page you see _after_ you click on a notification.

------
romanovcode
The only thing that made me go back to old design is "Mark all as read" is
gone.

Who thought it is a good idea to remove that button?

~~~
yxhuvud
You can mark all as read. To do that select all, click the ...-button and then
Mark all as read.

Not super streamlined, but it definitely is there.

------
lioeters
This reminded me to write some feedback for the new notification UI in GitHub.
I requested a feature that was in the classic version, to hover and preview
latest comment without going to another page to view what trigerred the
notification. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with some of the new features.

------
eating555
I miss the old way that organizing notifications by repos, so that I can work
on the repos in higher priority.

------
simplify
I didn't like it at first, but after actually using it I find it very helpful
in keeping on top of all types of things to do/watch/respond.

