1098401 - Menu icon badge to indicate update notifications looks out-of-place

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Attachment: Screenshot

See attached screenshot. When I start aurora it looks fine. After a while I notice there is a green star in the top-right corner. What is it? Where did it come from? Will it replicate until it covers my entire screen? These are the unsolved mysteries of Firefox.

At some point I'll try reproing on a clean profile to see if it happens there, but I don't know how long it takes to appear so it's a bit annoying.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Did you try clicking it? And did the menu panel then not have a massive bar indicating you could update? Did it not go away when you clicked it? And/or does the menu button not have a tooltip indicating that it's about an update? :-)

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

or, in case that is a more constructive question: what should we have done to make it more obvious that this is an update notification?

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> Did you try clicking it?

I hadn't tried clicking it before because I was afraid of what it might do! But I tried just now to click it directly and the click ended up going to the menu button under it.

> And did the menu panel then not have a massive bar
> indicating you could update? Did it not go away when you clicked it? And/or
> does the menu button not have a tooltip indicating that it's about an
> update? :-)

Yes, the menu panel does have a massive bar indicating I can update, and presumably when I do so the green star will go away. However the tooltip on the menu button just says "Open menu" and there is no clear link between the update item in the menu and the green star.

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #2)
> or, in case that is a more constructive question: what should we have done
> to make it more obvious that this is an update notification?

I think my first impression of the green star (and the reason that I filed the bug) is that it looks like it's a misplaced icon, rather than an "annotation" on the menu button. Having the menu button icon change color or more subtly interweave with the star might make that look better and make it more obvious that the star is about notifications inside the menu. Even having the star have an hover effect in sync with the menu button's hover effect would probably achieve this. If the star had a tooltip of its own (or the menu button tooltip updated - which it sounds like it should have from your comment) that might have helped as well.

Comment 4

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

I had originally modified the tooltip, but removed it per the suggestion in bug 1080690 comment 2. I think using that as well as the UX-suggested icon in bug 1080406 would have made it more evident that this is an update notification. Matteo, did you ever get the graphics assets from UX?

Comment 5

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Panos Astithas [:past] (overloaded, please needinfo) from comment #4)
> I had originally modified the tooltip, but removed it per the suggestion in
> bug 1080690 comment 2.

FWIW I think updating the tooltip text would have been nice. A pet peeve of mine is when interface use icons to replace textual labels even though the concept is hard to represent with an icon. Sometimes a picture is worth less than words!

> I think using that as well as the UX-suggested icon
> in bug 1080406 would have made it more evident that this is an update
> notification. Matteo, did you ever get the graphics assets from UX?

The screenshot provided on that bug does look better. I would also suggest using a darker version of that on the Aurora ("dark") theme because one of the things that's incongruous there is how bright the green icon is compared to the rest of the toolbar.

Comment 6

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

And for the record, now that I know what that is, I much prefer having it to not having it - often I forget to apply updates because I'm in the middle of something and later forget about the notification. This icon makes me much more likely to apply updates in a timely manner. Thanks!

Comment 7

[Panos Astithas (he/him) [:past] (please ni?)]

The icon was changed a while ago to the one suggested by the UX team, so I think we can close this bug.