Experimenting with a design idea for a low-stimuli chat client, specifically the visualization of unread messages and notifications (I cannot sufficiently express my burning hatred for anxiety-inducing bright-red-background notification counts)
Abolish red notification dots tbh
@joepie91 and only the dots that are relevant will be shown?
@bananas The exact visualization algorithm would have a bit of complexity to it: the current idea boils down to "a ping must always remain visible, even if there have been many non-ping messages after it, but the ordering of dots should still give you an impression of the amount of activity since the ping".
In practice that mostly means it will visualize the last 3 messages, starting the 'fill' from the top (if there's less than 3 then the remainder is light gray placeholder dots), but the pings will 'pile up' once pushed to the top and always remain visible even if there have been many non-pings since.
@bananas (In practice it would be 'loud notification dots' and 'quiet notification dots' and you can configure what it does when, the above is just the default mapping)
@joepie91 it's a nice concept
@joepie91 the environment canada weather app has them now under a 'messages' tab. the 'messages' are articles about the weather 🤦
@forestine The only description I have for design choices like that is "utterly disrespectful of people's time and energy", to be honest, it speaks of a callous sense of self-importance, simply assuming that everyone must always want to read their articles with the greatest haste... it's probably one of my least favourite tech developments of the past decade or so
Some of the ideas that went into the design: the exact notification count doesn't actually *matter*, but you may want to know whether someone just pinged you once or repeatedly; and you might want to get a general idea of whether there's been conversation since the ping, or not. All of those states can be represented with these three dots, without yelling "look at me!" at you all the time.