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I am creating a notifications feature on a website which tells the user they have some notifications that they should check, for example they have a reply to a comment that they wrote.

They can go to their notifications page and see a list of all of their notifications. Now I want to mark all of these notifications as read instead of as unread, but only if the user actually received my server's response. The solution I can think of is:

  • writing some js code which when the page is loaded will send some ajax request and tell my server to mark all the notifications on the page to be marked as read

but I was wondering what are people's thoughts on this and if there is some good well known pattern. couldn't find a satisfactory answer.

user3494047
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1 Answers1

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For the most part there isn't really a specific way you should do this, but there are basic principles that will help you make sure your implementation is use friendly

User Interaction

I really cannot emphasize this enough, when dealing with notification you MUST NOT assume the user has seen anything they haven't interacted with, for a number of different reasons I won't elaborate on a user may not see a notification, this should be extended to INDIVIDUAL notifications... You cannot assume that because the user opened the notification panel with 100+ notification that they read them all.

Bulk Support

In many cases a user may have many notifications, it is often useful to roll similar notifications together in bulk. This will make large amounts of notifications easier for the users to digest. An example of this in use can be observed on Facebook, where they say "10 users liked your post" instead of giving separate notifications for each individual.

Clear Support

Allow some way for the user to identify that he has viewed all notifications, this can be critical in the case of the above scenario where the user is barraged by notifications, if he has to interact with them all individual individually it could be a nightmare, but make sure that it is clear what the user is doing. Example: Button labeled "Mark all as read".

42shadow42
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