Similar items (based on severity / color codes, or titles) can be automatically grouped by the Notification center and then acted on in their ‘stack’ as a mini ‘batch’.
Anatomy
Usage
Notification stacking is intended to deal with this use case: often a user can see many similar notifications, and may want to deal with them all in a ‘batch’, or expand to deal with a particularly relevant task.
Example
“The disk {diskname} is nearly full” could appear 30 times, but the user understands that only one or two of those are immediately relevant and may wish to keep the stack collapsed until it’s time to deal with it.
States
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Stacked
- The most recent notification is shown on top
- A visual indicator is present to show that a stack is underneath
- A text label shows the number of items in the stack
- The context menu and dismiss control both function on the stack as a batch
-
Clicked stack
- Clicking on the notification stack expands the notifications into their separate items, sorted by recency
Behaviours
Similar notifications are stacked, and the stack expands when clicked. While stacked its possible to perform some batch actions on the stack.
Notifications stacking logic could be handled by the app itself, or by a centralised notification service. Factors like recency, title, severity could be weighted and a significant similarity between two or more notifications would be enough to ‘stack’ them together.