Design Critique - Notifications bar

Description
Notifications bar is a feature of a mobile phone interface that informs or notifies users of some impending action or change. It can be anything from an update for an app, a new email, a text message, the weather and much more. It allows the user a trampoline to directly access the necessary app when action is required.

Android feature : Top 3 chronologically ordered notifications are visible on the notifications bar from any screen

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Consistency

The primary design principle met is consistency. Any update or notification from any application on the smartphone will be seen in one common place – the notification bar. The user does not need to specifically open each individual application to check if there are any notifications.

Fig 1 Notifications for different apps are visible in the same screen and grouped by application

Visibility

The notifications bar allows the user to view what the notification is about – for example, the title and sender of an email. This allows the user to decide whether to ignore the notification or to open the application. Once the notification bar is pulled down, the notifications are grouped by application. This neat organized look to the notifications bar is a very appealing feature. Another point that adds to visibility is that the user can pull down the notification bar, view the notifications and roll it back up again to continue with whatever previous application was open. Unless the user taps on a particular notification, simply viewing the notifications does not in any way hinder the user's present application.

Fig 2 Notifications for different apps contain brief messages available from the notifications bar

Feedback

Tiny icons on the status bar are a very good feedback feature. During the use of most fullscreen applications, when a new email or message arrives, the status bar which was previously hidden becomes visible for a short period of time. It contains the icon of the notification along with a short message (as seen in the Fig. 3(a) Message from … and status bar with top 3 other previous notifications in Fig. 3(b)). This is an extremely well designed feature as it allows the user to continue the fullscreen application, say a game, while also scanning the latest update and making a decision whether or not to react to it. 

Fig 3(a) Notification while using gallery Fig 3(b) Top 3 notifications on status bar

I feel that informative feedback is also well thought of in this design. When one touches the status bar, a strip to aid in pulling the notifications page appears. This is intuitive enough to allow people to access their notifications. Touching or tapping on the notification preview/description takes you to the corresponding application while sliding the whole text left or right, removes the notification from the list. A user is able to grab and move the notification to the side to clear it and back to the center if they decide against clearing it. There is a 'clear all' button that is useful if a user wants to ignore all notifications.

Affordances

The notifications bar definitely fulfills all affordances of the feature. It is a summary or notification list that a user can access by tapping on the status bar, and pulling down on a tab. Once the list is pulled out, you can see very well organized and grouped notifications about different applications on your phone. This can be anything from weather or email or text messages. And these change dynamically when a notification comes in. This is why it's easy to understand and perceive the notification list for what it is.

Conceptual Model

In terms of conceptual model, the notifications bar also includes a shortcut to the phone settings. This enables the user to change or modify any setting quickly based on a notification. Some notification bar designs enabling frequent users to use shortcuts. This is available on the samsung smartphone as shown in Fig 4. HTC phone users requires third party application for the same feature. This slightly inconvenient for the HTC phone users.

Fig 4 Quick settings for WiFi, GPS, Sound etc on the notifications screen (usually followed by notifications)

Limitations

The main limitation of this feature that I have encountered is the lack of an undo button for the clear-all button. However, since these notifications are of apps that use the internet a lot, turning on and off the WiFi or mobile internet data often gets back the list of notifications. For an individual notification swiped out of the screen, if the user remembers the application, it is possible to go the application and understand what the notification was about.