Are there guidelines or best practices for notifications or prompts for how to use your app?

Question

I have even seen this in high-end professional 3d applications, where they will always show you messages, notifications, or prompts for how to perform the most basic tasks such as selecting things, changing values, how to navigate your 3d viewport, etc.

I have seen apps where they show this message statically where it stays there on screen, so not as distracting but some apps flash you on and off with these messages, which I find is taking my attention as my eye is moving to what's changing on the screen, or I have to block it out mentally, which takes mental energy.

I understand this is good for beginners maybe for the first few weeks, but after you know these, isn't this a negative trait for the app that will be imposed on seasoned users for years to come?

Are there any guidelines for such things? At least some practice to have the option to turn these off?

After you know an app, you should have to be reminded how to do these basic tasks, it just takes away from the actual task at hand.

What do you think?

Answer 1

Most design systems or development frameworks have built-in notification or messaging elements, but often they are not configured or simply set to default values that may or may not be appropriate for individual contexts.

A simple way to think about what 'best practice' should you, you can consider these different types of common messages that are generated and then expand or consolidate as required:

• System generated messages (either relating to the application itself such as maintenance schedule leading to downtime or updates)
• User generated messages (triggered by user driven activities as part of a task or process in the application)

Messages can also contain information that have different priority and urgency, and whether they require user intervention or if they can be dealt with later:

• Errors that prevent tasks from being completed
• Warnings that may require further investigation or to proceed with caution
• Success that confirm the completion of a user task
• Info that provide additional details depending on the context

Components that are usually used to handle the notification and messaging in most applications include:

• Alerts that appear at the top of the application just below the main navigation component that are persistent but sometimes also dismissible
• Modals that appear in the centre of the application, usually as a lightbox effect to block out other content
• Toasts that appear in the corners or boundaries of the application, usually not persistent and dismissible

By combinging these elements you can also come up with something that will work for your project/application.