CUNY Academic Commons

Thank you for this, Chris! Though, looking through those examples, I have to ask: do users ever find these anything but annoying?

FWIW, my preferences are for modal overlay or announcement box.

I do wonder whether can/should connect whatever announcement we make to an email push with the same messaging.

Thanks Matt, I think the level of annoyance is tied to whether the info is in context and how easy it is to get rid of.

and yes, these should be a part of a larger process that informs people of whatever it is in different ways. For large things that could mean an email push. For smaller things there might be other processes

Finally putting in my two cents here:

I definitely agree that there should be some standards created here. Based on Chris' outlined options, my votes would be the following:

• Urgent One Time Announcement: The announcement box would be best here (like Citi-One-Time-ServiceNotice.png). I can't think of any announcements that we would have that are so urgent that they need to completely block the screen. We just have to make sure the announcement box is different enough from the rest of the page that it's highly noticeable. Maybe locked below the Wordpress bar at the top of the page in a bright color.
• Non-Urgent One Time Announcement: I think that the announcement box OR walkthrough pop-up would be good for this depending on the information. For non-critical info it could be an announcement box -- could be a different color from the Urgent One Time Announcement box (maybe orange here rather than red). A walkthrough-style pop-up (Google-Walkthrough-step-4.png) would be best for additions to the site because they can point specifically to the new element if needed. This would have been ideal for My Commons.
• Permanent Site UI change: Walkthrough; one or more as needed (Google-Walkthrough-step-3.png).

I'm fine with all of that. Thanks, Samantha and Chris.

Agreed. Will post mock-ups for this soon.

Thanks, Sam. Mockups seem generally fine to me. You're correct that the walkthrough (3) is more complex, but I think there are JS libraries that should help us to set things up fairly easily.

Animation. I think that each of these should have some kind of CSS animation/transition that helps bring it to the attention of the user (slide down, fade in...)(Sam's note: I like slide down as an option here -- open to developer ideas/preferences)

Yup, whatever you need is fine. Slidedown doesn't work for the walkthrough bubbles, but is fine for the top-of-the-screen notices.

Remove on Close: I'm thinking that for the one-time messages you won't see them after you close/dismiss them. Let me know if you have other thoughts.

+1. Flip side is that they will be persistent when clicking through to another page. Seeing the animation each time might be annoying (though the annoyingness might be a feature, as it encourages people to read and dismiss).

I'm assuming that these will be created in the WP dashboard in some way. Maybe I'm wrong.

This makes it more complicated than hardcoding. Let's get the user-facing UI settled first, and we can worry afterward about building an admin-facing interface for managing these things. Note that it's unlikely we'll be able to have an admin-facing UI for managing walkthrough-style notifications; these likely have to be described in code.

+1. Flip side is that they will be persistent when clicking through to another page. Seeing the animation each time might be annoying (though the annoyingness might be a feature, as it encourages people to read and dismiss).

Since these will mostly be notifications that we really want people to see (especially urgent ones) I agree that the annoyingness is a feature here.

This makes it more complicated than hardcoding. Let's get the user-facing UI settled first, and we can worry afterward about building an admin-facing interface for managing these things. Note that it's unlikely we'll be able to have an admin-facing UI for managing walkthrough-style notifications; these likely have to be described in code.

Sounds good!

Let me know if you need anything else from UX on this. Thanks!

I assume the timeline is too short for this to be enacted next week, but taking the context of the upcoming site downtime as an opportunity to poke this ticket.

Ah, yeah, I'm afraid I don't have the bandwidth to build this out at the moment. For Tuesday, I was planning on using the same dismissable overlay that we used for the survey. Does that seem OK to you?

Yeah, that ones good for now, especially considering that it's summer -- no problem.
I would love to see these overlays enacted before the next alert is needed in the future, and now we have a great example use.

Thanks for all of this, Boone. Here are my thoughts:

Color -- Sam's comps didn't show the two colors together, and they look a bit off to me when posted together. So, two questions: how often do we think there will be both an urgent and non-urgent message at the same time? If that is possibly a common use case, especially for users who may not log in that often (and thus may accumulate announcements), I'd love to hear thoughts on the colors from Chris and Paige.

Multiples -- What happens if there are multiple non-urgent or urgent announcements -- do they just start pushing down the page and obscuring site content?

Thoughts on your implementation questions:

1. okay, though see my question about cascading above
2. okay
3. okay re no auto-expiration date, but we'll need to be very assiduous about logging these so that we remember to turn them off, especially as those of us who dismiss them may forget that they are active.

Mapped domain -- I think we should disable entirely on mapped domains if they can't be dismissed, as having the notices appear w/o the ability to dismiss could be very problematic. If if is possible to show the warnings on the dashboards of mapped domains but not the frontends, we might explore that, as it would give us a chance to warn admins of coming changes.

Thanks again for all of your work on this.

Matt, thanks very much for the feedback.

Color -- Sam's comps didn't show the two colors together, and they look a bit off to me when posted together. So, two questions: how often do we think there will be both an urgent and non-urgent message at the same time? If that is possibly a common use case, especially for users who may not log in that often (and thus may accumulate announcements), I'd love to hear thoughts on the colors from Chris and Paige.

I'd think it'd be quite rare for them to appear at the same time. That said, I'm glad to swap out colors as you'd like.

Multiples -- What happens if there are multiple non-urgent or urgent announcements -- do they just start pushing down the page and obscuring site content?

They stack vertically. They don't obscure content (in the sense that they overlay it), but they do push the site content down further and further. I can't imagine that there'll be many circumstances where we have more than one or two notices active at a time (or, rather, maybe we should have a policy to this effect - it's not a great user experience to visit the page after a few months and have to click through a half-dozen notices).

Mapped domain -- I think we should disable entirely on mapped domains if they can't be dismissed, as having the notices appear w/o the ability to dismiss could be very problematic. If if is possible to show the warnings on the dashboards of mapped domains but not the frontends, we might explore that, as it would give us a chance to warn admins of coming changes.

For now, I'll disable on mapped domains. I'll look into implementing the feature on mapped domains as part of a separate ticket. It will require a technical kludge.