Is it beneficial for users to be able to change the display location of user and system notifications?
Some back story. I'm working on a data science platform, and sometimes when working with Jupyter, RStudio, H20, etc, displaying notifications works for one type of notebook but not the other.
Because each of these products has it's own set of controls, and more precisely, it's own UX, notifications tend to "get in the way" of some controls depending upon which product they're using.
We currently offer a raw-log view, this however is not sortable, searchable, or digestible without knowing exactly what you're looking for. This raw-log has everything from starts, stops, errors, deployment output and setup output, etc. It's completely unusable.
When I propose a design, someone says "This solves the problem [here], but not [here]." However, our app's notifications blocks controls, lacks a way to dismiss, lacks any meta data, and sometimes fires multiple times, creating a wall of notifications.
Because I can't seem to get alerts and notifications prioritized, I have to make proposals that are somewhat out of scope for whatever project I'm working on. During interviews or feedback sessions, users have mentioned that these notifications get in the way, by blocking controls, hence why I would like to propose that the user have the ability to at least change the location, and possibly the type.
I have proposed that we use a chrome(top-control-bar) notification flyout(with meta data and deep links), however that is met with some resistance.
I'm wondering if…
- The ROI on allowing the user to specify the display type/position is beneficial, or would improve the overall UX?
- What are some ways to get the engineering team to consider notification improvements?
If anyone has specific examples of web-apps(non-mobile) that use this pattern or offer this feature, I would love to hear/see them.
Comments, suggestions, opinions are always welcomed, and thanks in advanced.
Some posts I've read regarding similar topics.
Alternative method of displaying notification alert to user with awkward icons
Good examples of notification systems (other than iphone/android)?
Feedback : notification displaying and removal
Should users be able to customise everything or should the UX team decide for them?
Placement of flash/growl notifications or messages in web application