Feedback needed for design of Flash messages

Matt Wagner matt.wagner at redhat.com
Wed Aug 15 14:04:31 UTC 2012


On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 10:05:40AM +0200, Jaromír Coufal wrote:
> >However, I've noticed in the past that people can overlook our flash
> >messages because they can be so subtle. I think these will help, but I
> >wonder if it's worth giving them more aggressive backgrounds or
> >something.
> >
> >I'm not sure it's as attractive, but I just forked that and put this
> >together: http://codepen.io/n1zyy/pen/xvfms
> You have a point, I was also thinking about coloring a background.
> From usability point of view it would definitely increase it's
> visibility. On the other hand it might be to much poppy and
> irritating. Except better visibility, I also wanted these flash
> messages to be decent (not blatant) and current design compatible.
> That's why I used left colored border and improved icons. For
> increasing usability there are also links.

Yes, I'm torn about this. Though I wonder if we could make them look
like shiny candy buttons or something. There's got to be a way to make
them noticeable but also visually-appealing.

> Another fact is, that majority occurrence of flash messages is at
> form pages, where we will (hopefully) have improved forms with
> highlighted invalid input fields. And what we don't want is to
> significantly alert to user on each and every place of the page that
> he is wrong. This could be contra-productive.

This is a really good point that I hadn't considered, actually. Although
they're not all like that, and I think we need the more critical
failures (for example, launch failures) to be called out a good bit.

> I think, if we have flash messages at the top of the page (don't get
> confused by codepan, because it displays it in the second half of the
> page), the visibility should be enough, because it should also
> cooperate with other features to help user in fulfilling his goal.
> Not as independent alerting function.

Do you mean *above* the blue header, at the very top of the page?

> Do you agree?
> >(Also: my first entry on codepen.io -- nifty site!)
> Great! Welcome at Codepan! :) I like it so much, even though it has
> some annoying bugs, which make my day worse, but in general really
> handy tool.

I'm yet to hit any bugs, but I'm sure in due time I will. :)

> >I just set a background-color set to a lighten()'d version of the border
> >color. They're maybe a bit uglier, but they're harder to miss.
> As Brian suggested to darken background a little bit, I agree (if it
> should be this case), so I used your fork and adjusted that a little
> bit:
> http://codepen.io/coufalj/pen/FdnjH
> 
> But in my opinion it is too jarring.

I think they still look good. The light orange color looks a little
pink/peach-y on my monitor, but they look good to me.

> >Just a thought, in any case.
> Matt, thank you for all of your contributions, really like your ideas
> and every piece of discussion can bring better result in the end, so
> it is really welcome.

Happy to help!

-- Matt



More information about the aeolus-devel mailing list