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Toasts Are Bad UX

lolinder
59 replies
5h55m

I'm not convinced. Most of the argument seems to be that redundant UX is bad UX:

But by archiving the email, the email disappears from the list, which already implies the action was successful.

In this example, the button already includes a confirmation so the toast is entirely unnecessary.

I vehemently disagree with the idea that just because you're already communicating something one way it's bad UX to include another way of communicating the same thing at the same time. Redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug, and it's present in all human languages. It ensures that even in less than ideal conditions the message still gets through.

In the case of toasts, having a single, standardized way of communicating the status of all actions (and if possible providing the undo) allows a user to quickly pick up on the pattern. Extra indicators closer to the action can be valuable too, but it's when they're paired with the toast that their meaning becomes entirely clear. To remove the toast in favor of a bunch of specific indicators is to force your user to learn several different ways of saying "it's done now" entirely from context (many of which will be small and subtle as in the examples given). This might work fine for you and me but isn't great for, say, the elderly or the vision impaired or children.

Unless they're actually getting in the way, toasts aren't bad UX, they're redundant UX, and a UX designer shouldn't be striving to optimize away redundancy.

cowsandmilk
27 replies
5h30m

The unfortunate thing is they aren’t communicating the same thing.

Taking the YouTube example, the checkboxes are 100% optimistic while the toast notification indicates that the request to the backend that was fired off asynchronously was successful. With the archive message example, it is the same thing. The message is removed from the list optimistically and the toast message is representing that the message was actually archived.

I would much rather only get the toast if there is a failure to commit the change. Generally, them flashing up is a distraction from what I’m trying to accomplish. And being far on the screen from where I’m taking an action makes them even more of a distraction.

lolinder
14 replies
5h27m

I disagree on that—in the YouTube example specifically this isn't necessarily a problem, but the toast serves a valuable purpose in the archive in that it tells you again which button it was that you pressed. There have been countless times in cases like that where the toast has saved me and allowed me to undo a misclick.

I can see the argument that there are certain places where people use toasts that are unnecessary and provide information that the user doesn't need. But that's not the same thing as toasts being bad UX in the general case.

hombre_fatal
13 replies
3h11m

Toasts also give you a good place to put other shortcuts like “Item updated. [View item]” that make it much easier to act on state changes, like navigate to sensible places to view / react to those changes.

CRConrad
8 replies
2h46m

Toasts also give you a good place to put other shortcuts like “Item updated. [View item]” that make it much easier to act on state changes

Not if they go away, and take their “[View item]” button with them, before you've had time to read the notification, decide if you want to click the button, and actually get your cursor there to click it.

Which they usually do. So nyaaah, dubious benefit.

michaelmrose
4 replies
2h20m

Should complex websites have a notification center where you can look at prior notifications? Would this be alike enough to existing desktop metaphors to be easily recognizable or simply confusing.

Maybe your browser should could have an icon for same instead making it more standardized across different sites.

hunter2_
2 replies
1h47m

Browsers that support JavaScript typically implement the Notification API. This API asks for user confirmation to allow popups and give the programmer the opportunity to display notifications with a text (body) along with an descriptive icon and header.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_notification#JavaScript

michaelmrose
0 replies
40m

I never only allow notifications from a tiny number of sites. The ability to notify me while on the page is different from notifying me while the tab is in the background and more so yet than the ability to bug me whenever.

Ask for everything get nothing. I imagine most people click no

TeMPOraL
0 replies
1h35m

Of course, this is just abused by sites to spew their garbage outside the confines of their own pages, which makes the API effectively dead.

TeMPOraL
0 replies
1h9m

I'd go for an action log. It's almost the same thing, but notifications imply ephemeral pokes about some of the stuff that happened, mixed with engagement boosting spam - there's a lot of unpredictability embedded in this concept, as the app is usually trying to guess what you may (or it thinks you should) find relevant.

An action/activity log is just a reverse-chonological log of things that happened. You could make one by recording every would-be toast and putting it on that list, complete with a timestamp, and any of the context-relevant action buttons (like "undo", or "view item", etc.). The list should be a fixed recording[0], without any way to dismiss some or all of the entries. Add some attention-grabbing indicator whenever something is added there, and you get all the benefits of toasts with none of the drawbacks: the log lets you report completion of optimistically-executed actions, provide place for context-relevant buttons, and also is accessible, can be browsed at uses' own time, improves discoverability and learning, and can be upgraded to also enable undo feature.

--

[0] - Well, appended from top, and possibly unwinded by undo. Users understand that. Can't be append-only, because mixing that with undo gives you the undo system from Emacs - very powerful but also nearly incomprehensible to most people.

lolinder
2 replies
2h45m

So there are badly implemented toasts that have bad UX. That's not the same thing as the whole concept being bad.

exmadscientist
1 replies
40m

If something is so hard to implement that everyone who tries gets it wrong (to a first approximation), then maybe the concept is bad. Or, at least, the concept isn't fully baked and is missing something critical.

lolinder
0 replies
33m

Most implementations of toasts-with-actions that I've seen don't have the problem OP described. I more often find myself manually dismissing them than wishing they'd have stuck around longer.

datavirtue
3 replies
2h53m

All of that is inacessible.

lolinder
2 replies
2h46m

How so?

jdiff
1 replies
2h8m

Screen reader's probably not going to catch a transient element unless you just happen to stumble across it within that narrow window. Slow reader for whatever reason? Hope you don't take too long, or hope that toast wasn't actually important/actionable for you.

mannykannot
5 replies
4h44m

Fair enough, but when they are not communicating the same thing, there are no grounds for objecting to them on the basis of redundancy.

The problem with notification only of failure is that one is left uncertain about success, though I would agree that striking a balance between distraction and uncertainty is difficult.

JamesSwift
2 replies
4h7m

It also would mean you would move the item eagerly, then put it back on error. Or alternatively make it a "ghost" item in the list then remove on success. But overall the eager-move + toast + undo is just a much faster feeling implementation and the overall UX is so much cleaner.

notpushkin
1 replies
3h18m

The undo button justifies the toast here IMO. Otherwise I'd prefer ghosting really.

For the checkboxes, I'd say GitHub nailed it: for settings that are applied instantly (e. g. https://github.com/settings/appearance), they show a spinner and then a single checkmark right across the section title. (It used to be next to the input element – both ways are fine, I think)

JamesSwift
0 replies
2h7m

I agree they do a good job, but I think a toast without undo could also work there. Apply the UI eagerly, toast success or failure. As it is, I assume on failure it becomes an 'X' and shows an error? I just dont generally like very short transitions like the spinner is currently. In general, coming from app land, I prefer a deferred loading spinner that only shows if the action takes X ms. So in the happy path of a fast action the user never sees the loading state.

CRConrad
1 replies
2h44m

The problem with notification only of failure is that one is left uncertain about success

But that's less a problem with getting notified or not, and more a problem with software not doing what you've told it to do.

kccqzy
0 replies
2h16m

That's the problem of whether the developer and the user have the same expectation of the max duration or timeout of an action. For example a developer might default all backend actions to have a timeout of 30 seconds. But as a user, if the action succeeds quickly (the usual case) I want to immediately see a confirmation of that. I don't want to wait 30 seconds just to see no notification about any failure.

JamesSwift
3 replies
4h8m

I mentioned this in another comment, but the whole reason the archive is able to be optimistic is partially because they offer the undo via toast. Otherwise its likely they would add an 'are you sure' plus a loading-state when doing these "semi-destructive" actions.

ryandrake
1 replies
3h8m

You can offer Undo via things other than toasts, though. In fact, I wish more software offered Undo--the Undo feature has kind of gone out of fashion since the early 2000s. You should be able to Undo anything (and follow the Undo chain back through many past actions). We somehow lost this ability from software.

JamesSwift
0 replies
2h12m

For sure you can, but a toast is a tool in the toolbox. When it makes sense to use it, it definitely justifies its existence as a tool to keep around.

abirch
0 replies
2h31m

I've accidently archived something only to realize it when the toast pops up. I'm grateful for the toast instead of having the 'are you sure' like you mentioned. It's a nice compromise.

cellularmitosis
0 replies
1h18m

I would much rather only get the toast if there is a failure to commit the change ... And being far on the screen from where I’m taking an action makes them even more of a distraction.

But wouldn't this situation be even worse with a failure-only toast? A request timeout could happen 30 seconds after the fact. You're likely in a very different UI state at that point, and unless the error message is very specific, you'll have no idea what even failed if you are quickly performing lots of actions.

bigblind
0 replies
3h59m

Toasts showing up far from where the action is take also makes them super annoying for people (like me) who use screen magnifiers. I'm oftne using a site while zoomed in, and will completely miss a toast, because it never enters the "viewport" on the screen I'm looking at.

arcbyte
8 replies
4h53m

Have you worked with an old person?

Redundancy in UX confuses them. The closer you can get to the whole UI being a single sentence and two buttons the better.

Sakos
5 replies
4h45m

Have you?

Things disappearing with insufficient explicit feedback for what actually happened to the things is one of the most common issues I've encountered with older computer users. I think it's the most common issue. Toasts add persistency and visibility for users who barely or don't understand the UIs they're interacting with, which makes it easier to understand what happened.

If Outlook gave feedback to every user action in a toast, then provided a universal history of every toast, you would probably resolve a significant amount of issues caused by user actions leading to unintended changes (and being unable to recognize that the action lead to a particular change, or even how the current state differs from the previous one).

thomastjeffery
0 replies
3h29m

Toasts literally disappear..

jimmygrapes
0 replies
4h27m

If Outlook showed a toast for every action I take, I would immediately do everything in my power to make it stop, up to and including hermitage.

dsego
0 replies
2h53m

Things disappearing with insufficient explicit feedback

Toasts appear somewhere in the corner and then disappear very quickly. Not sure how useful that feedback is. It's distracting at best.

digging
0 replies
4h0m

If Outlook gave feedback to every user action in a toast, then provided a universal history of every toast

This is what message feeds are for. Toasts are just a worse implementation of message/notification feeds.

JohnFen
0 replies
3h40m

If Outlook gave feedback to every user action in a toast

That would make me utterly crazy. I couldn't use an application that did this.

neolefty
0 replies
4h37m

For sure — I've seen that struggle.

This discussion tells me we have not yet reached perfection in UI! Toasts are good for me, but definitely not good for the users you and others have described.

My hope is that small AIs inside UX can help here. Can you tell your UI framework something like, "Give them a choice between X and Y." and then "Clearly indicate they have chosen Y." (with a fallback of "Tell them something went wrong, and they won't be able to make a choice right now after all.")

Or is it simpler than that, and we don't micro-manage the AI-powered UI engine? "Get answers to these questions, and submit them to this API." — and UI engine does all the rest? I'm not sure.

Anyway, an improved UI would adapt to the user — think of the way a person providing a service adapts to the customer, intelligently and empathetically. For example a teacher watching for signs of understanding in a student, adjusting explanations. A car salesperson being quick and businesslike with one customer and listening patiently to another.

lolinder
0 replies
4h46m

Yes. And I've never once run into issues with redundancy of information being a problem. It's the clever things people do to hide information or to be concise that reliably get them confused.

The closer you can get to the whole UI being a single sentence and two buttons the better.

Sure, but this is kind of my point—clever UX tricks to communicate things without words don't work for them. A toast is valuable for the tech-illiterate precisely because it uses English text to communicate its point, and having it exist in the same spot for every action makes it easier for them to pick up.

It's not the be-all end-all of UX design for the elderly, but it's a heck of a lot better than the alternatives proposed in TFA.

dkarl
5 replies
5h13m

I think the suggested improvement clarifies what he means: if you're worried that the UI element the user is interacting with doesn't fully convey what's happening, then improve that element rather than adding a second element that divides the user's attention and challenges them to read quickly and make the connection themselves. Communicate the failure of their interaction in the context of the element they interacted with, so the connection is clear.

A toast makes sense as a worst-case, last-gasp, no-context attempt to communicate with a user. In this example, if the user unchecked a playlist and dismissed the list of playlists while the save was happening, and then the save failed, a toast makes sense because the context of the action is gone. Might as well put the information at a random spot on the screen.

Even then, a toast probably isn't the best you can do, if you really want the user to understand the error. In a the-user-is-the-product adware application like YouTube, you probably don't care if the user misses errors like these (and might even prefer that they do), but in a business application you wouldn't want to gamble on the user missing the toast or confusing it with a different error. It might be more helpful for a normal user if you re-open the element and show them the error in context. Open up the list of playlists and animate something to draw their attention to the fact that their change didn't save. I'm probably getting pie in the sky here, because that sounds really difficult to do in a systematic way, but in an ideal world, you'd always see errors in context.

lolinder
4 replies
5h5m

I get what they were saying and agree that in-context feedback should be added wherever possible. I just disagree that leaving off the toast is (in the cases cited) valuable.

Taking the archive example: yes, the disappearing message successfully indicates that something happened. But it doesn't tell you if the message was deleted or archived, and misclicks are common. The toast unambiguously communicates what happened in addition to saying that something happened.

Additionally, I stand by my argument that consistency is valuable. By all means have in-context feedback, but also pick a standard way that you always use to communicate completion of all actions. It makes it a lot easier to understand and eventually make use of the in-context feedback which may not be as intuitive as you think it is.

digging
3 replies
4h1m

I just disagree that leaving off the toast is (in the cases cited) valuable.

But adding a toast isn't free. It's a distraction, and arguably a pretty intense one for ND folks -- especially when it becomes a standardized message center with multiple items queued up.

In many cases the most useful toasts would also be better if they weren't toasts. For me, the most useful toast I interact with also demonstrates why toasts are bad UX: creating a new ticket in Jira. Since that can't happen instantly, it needs a delayed message to let you know when the ticket is created and you actually have a URL to open. A toast is useful in this case, but it's also far from optimal, because for some reason it's going to disappear in a few seconds, and it also won't tell me how many seconds I have left to read it.

Why would distraction be the primary mechanism? We figured out decades ago how to put a button in the header that opens a messages feed which the user can read and dismiss at will. While it's possible to implement such a feed badly so that it's annoying, it's difficult to implement toasts in a way that aren't annoying. Maybe even impossible.

TeMPOraL
2 replies
51m

But adding a toast isn't free. It's a distraction, and arguably a pretty intense one for ND folks -- especially when it becomes a standardized message center with multiple items queued up.

Diagnosed with ADHD, so I'm guessing an ND folk here: modern applications in general, and webshit in particular, give me huge anxiety because of all the eventual consistency and optimistic actions bullshit[0], coupled with flakiness and bloat of entire modern software stacks[1]. Maybe "toasts" aren't the bee's knees, but they work as lagging indicator that something happened that I otherwise wouldn't notice, and in some apps even lets me undo the unwanted operation. That does a lot to relieve my anxiety and help me use software with less frustration.

--

[0] - That itself is a big antipattern. Software lying to user about its state is a form of gaslighting; it makes interaction more error-prone, and prevents users from building correct mental models of the application and its interactions with other systems.

[1] - My Android flagship lags often enough on taps and drags that every other day my input gets misinterpreted and does something unwanted. Similarly, I type faster than most software - webshit in particular - can react, so e.g. a small jitter can turn "ctrl+t n e w s <ret>" into "ctrl" (held, released) and then "n e w s <ret>", which does $deity knows what in the current tab.

digging
1 replies
41m

Maybe "toasts" aren't the bee's knees, but they work as lagging indicator that something happened that I otherwise wouldn't notice, and in some apps even lets me undo the unwanted operation. That does a lot to relieve my anxiety and help me use software with less frustration.

All things that a message log does better than toasts!

lolinder
0 replies
26m

Why not both? A message log can always be consulted later, but it doesn't give you a live feed of things that are happening.

I'm also ADHD and, like OP, I appreciate having the stream of toasts that lets me know what the software did. It's saved my butt a bunch of times when I accidentally do something I didn't mean to (deleting instead of archiving, for example). A message log would just get ignored, but toasts help a ton because they're visible.

the_other
4 replies
5h21m

I use a computer mainly by using a zoom tool to magnify the area around my text and mouse/finger cursoe. I miss almosst all toasts and most notifications because they not where I’m working. For my use case, feed near the item I’m interacting with is the only valuable feedback.

latexr
1 replies
5h12m

None of that invalidates what your parent comment is saying. They’re not saying you should use toasts to the detriment of other options, but in addition to them. If anything, your comment reinforces the notion that redundant information is beneficial because you don’t know where the user is looking.

lolinder
0 replies
5h3m

Yes. For example: while OP uses a magnifier, lots of other people use a screen reader. "Loading indicator disappeared" is a tricky thing to communicate clearly with audio. "Toast: save successful" is trivial.

kaoD
1 replies
5h16m

I assume you don't want a full screen reader if you're not already using one, but if toasts are properly implemented (big if), screen readers can actually present them accessibly via the ARIA alert pattern[0].

Wanted to mention in case you're not aware and maybe there's some tool somewhere (or some way to configure a screen reader?) so that you can keep your simple zoom workflow but still benefit from the ARIA alert pattern.

[0] https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/alert/

mceachen
0 replies
4h38m

Thanks for this! I visited your link and hadn’t seen such a nice demo with working code on w3.org before: whoever worked on these pages deserves kudos.

adamc
4 replies
2h57m

No, they're bad. Messages that are on the periphery of my vision/attention (imagine a widescreen monitor) are actively confusing. I'm working on THIS problem here and something flashes up over there. Half the time, as I refocus to read this annoying intrusion, it disappears.

It's bad UX. Put your damned messages where my attention has already been directed to BY YOUR UI.

nativeit
0 replies
2h8m

The inevitable tradeoff here is having a somewhat standardized location for notifications versus allowing them to appear arbitrarily determined by the developer’s notion of where they are ostensibly drawing your attention. Maybe that’s worthwhile, but I think there are going to be a lot of cases where the ideal location is ambiguous, or where devs have an idea for where your attention will be that’s not always correct, or where bad actors exploit this flexibility to make it look like something it isn’t in an effort to trick users. I don’t know the right answer to what might be best, but I tend to think that standardized features should be preferred when in doubt.

hunter2_
0 replies
2h6m

In some cases, the current user's focus is unrelated to the notification. For example: if the notification is alerting you to some foreign event like an incoming message, an app reading the clipboard on its own, an alarm, etc. -- some kind of standard positioning is needed for this.

I believe toasts should be confined to this scenario I'm describing, and indeed feedback directly coupled to user focus/input should be located near to that as you say.

cellularmitosis
0 replies
1h16m

Put your damned messages where my attention has already been directed to BY YOUR UI.

Ok, so where does the toast go if you've already scrolled or otherwise navigated to a different area of the UI? These optimistic updated could take multiple seconds to succeed, and maybe as much as 30 seconds to fail.

berkes
0 replies
2h43m

Yes! The problem isn't duplication of the message, nor is it that they convey slightly different things. The main problem is their lack of locality.

We can have an indicator, then some icon or even a green bar in the "save this" modal, just fine. Or we can make the "archive" icon color different, or add an error, an undo-button, or other message next to it if we really need to convey this information. This could be a tooltip, something in the icon-bar, or anything really: as long as it right at the place where I made the change and expected the change to show up.

cynicalpeace
1 replies
4h32m

I totally agree with you... this is why Java being so verbose is actually not terrible either, lmao come after me

bigstrat2003
0 replies
2h14m

Honestly I think the perennial "Java is too verbose" complaints are completely overblown, and say more bad about the person complaining than the language.

soneca
0 replies
4h35m

” Redundancy in communication is a feature, not a bug”

I completely agree with you.

The article kind of confirmed to me that toasts are good UX.

pc86
0 replies
2h41m

> But by archiving the email, the email disappears from the list, which already implies the action was successful.

Yeah this in particular bothers me. Someone that knows UI and UX should also know you can absolutely remove something on the front-end without a corresponding action on the back-end. If I click archive and the email disappears, that doesn't mean the back-end call succeeded or has even been made. How many times do you click move/delete/whatever in an app, the thing moves or disappears then a second later pops right back in? These things happen and the subsequent alert that it was actually successful is a good thing in my opinion.

nkozyra
0 replies
4h30m

redundant UX is bad UX

In general, I think the best use of toasts are to present options for further action (if needed).

Take the example of deleting an email and getting a toast that lets you undo. Your action has already been completed and you can see it. But you have more context that can be acted on. In this case it's not redundant, even though it relays the action you just take.

In this scenario, it's ideal to move this away from the viewport the user was in. In most cases, they don't need it. But if they do, it's onscreen.

Simple confirmations that do nothing else are redundant. But toasts don't have to be used that way.

cupantae
0 replies
5h39m

I agree. In the first example, you would assume the action completed even if you missed the toast. But in case you did notice it, that gives you a confirmation. Suboptimal? Maybe.

But the proposed solution is clearly worse, unless the loading circle turns into a tick to show completion

tomaytotomato
13 replies
5h57m

How about just getting rid of all food related jargon; salad bars, burgers, toasts, heroes etc.?

As a backend developer this stuff is mind-boggling, just call it "notification widget", or a "confirmation widget" etc.

Try explaining what toast is to an Indian subcontractor who has never eaten toasted bread in their life and then apply that to the UX usecase.

Removing these terms will also improve accessibility and understanding for junior developers entering the frontend world.

lolinder
5 replies
5h39m

While we're at it let's remove the jargon from other trades, too.

"P-trap" is a confusing word that plumbers use, we should instead have them say "gas barrier". And the word "fuse" makes very little sense in an electrical context—try explaining to someone who's never seen a stick of dynamite why the "overcurrent stopper" is named after a long gunpowder-infused cord! Traffic engineers shouldn't refer to "groups of cars" as "platoons" (they're not in the military!), and software developers should stop talking about "DDOS" and just say "lots of computers hitting my server at once"!

In all seriousness: jargon exists because it's useful to be able to refer to something that you use a lot conscisely and precisely. Your proposed replacements are not concise or precise, and they only solve the non-problem of people not understanding the etymology of the jargon. Part of learning a trade is learning the jargon associated with it, and that's true for every trade.

tomaytotomato
4 replies
5h18m

I get your reasoning but still why use food terms for jargon in UX instead of something else.

Your example of a "P-trap" is good but its not like plumbers are going around saying, get me the "slinky hotdog" to bend a copper pipe, or you need a "banoffee pie" to seal this joint.

lolinder
3 replies
5h14m

Why does it matter to you where the jargon came from? Why are vaguely shape-related jargon and military-derived jargon and acronyms okay but you draw the line at toast?

tomaytotomato
2 replies
5h6m

I would argue that FUBAR, P-trap, Dequeue, HALO are going to have a less likelihood of a context collision than borrowing an existing word that is ubiquitous in society.

For example in Google

"toast"

"toast menu"

"toast ux"

All yield different results

However "p-trap" gets you a narrowed list of results

lolinder
1 replies
4h58m

"Platoon" turns up military answers until I specify traffic. And I'm actually not at all sure what meaning of "HALO" you're referring to—it must be jargon not in my vocabulary, but for me it refers to a thing angels have and to a video game.

Again, it seems like you're inconsistent in applying your frustration with jargon. You're frustrated with jargon in an adjacent profession to yours, but don't seem to apply the same logic to professions that are entirely unrelated or to your own jargon.

ben_w
0 replies
4h24m

High Altitude Low Open, of a parachute approach.

briandear
2 replies
5h26m

I’ve been a developer (primarily back end) and I never heard the term toast until now. Perhaps I’m just simple, or maybe I stopped paying attention after “hamburger menu.” I’m probably too old to hang out with the cool kids anymore.

tomaytotomato
1 replies
5h15m

As a developer who started with jQuery and then Backbone.js it seems like frontend dev has become very rich but at the same time has developed some weird esoteric rituals and practices which don't seem to go with conventional software engineering.

wadadadad
0 replies
2h58m

I'm curious as to how you're defining 'conventional software engineering' here; can you give some examples of things that are not conventional software engineering in the front end?

wolpoli
0 replies
44m

I was definitely confused when I first learn that 'chip' elements in material design look like fries.

hk__2
0 replies
3h54m

As a backend developer this stuff is mind-boggling, just call it "notification widget", or a "confirmation widget" etc.

How would you call a hamburger menu? "menu widget with three-or-sometimes-a-different-number-of little horizontal lines"?

As a backend developer you also have some jargon but you’re too used to it to notice it.

fwip
0 replies
5h38m

To a backend developer, the appearance of the "notification widget" doesn't matter.

To a front-end dev or designer, it does. That's who the jargon is for.

ben_w
0 replies
4h26m

Off topic, but: what food (and indeed what UI element) is "heroes"?

I've heard of "hero pictures" (detailed close ups, I think named via the highest quality film props), but not food or other UI uses.

kzrdude
4 replies
4h19m

Where does the name toast come from anyway?

azornathogron
2 replies
4h16m

Toast "pops up" from the toaster when it's done.

gertrunde
0 replies
4h10m

That does make a certain amount of sense... much more sense than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_(honor) which for some weird, unexplainable reason my brain had decided was where the name came from...

JohnFen
0 replies
4h8m

In all of the years I've been dealing with "toasts", I never realized this until just now. I always thought it was some kind of weird reference to toasting with a drink or something.

Update: On consideration, I think my disconnect was because the plural of the notification method is "toasts", but the plural of the recooked bread slices is "toast". The plural of benedictions given prior to a drink is "toasts". So I mentally connected up with that.

CRConrad
3 replies
2h21m

Bah, you think you were confused? I thought it was about toasting, as in with drinks. (Yeah sure, "Are Bad UX" -- but since when is "Cheers!" a software metaphor? Weird AF.)

hunter2_
2 replies
1h49m

Seems like it could live among these:

We currently demand that users internalize several metaphors when interacting with Homebrew. These include:

Formula (how to build a bit of software)

Bottle (pre-built software)

Cask (pre-built software on macOS)

Tap (a collection of software)

Keg (where software installs itself)

Cellar (where all my software install themselves)

As well as an additional number of less-common metaphors that contributors and maintainers need to know, like Rack, Tab, and Formulary.

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/10798

zahlman
0 replies
6m

It seems like they put a lot of effort into trying to create a coherent extended metaphor, yet it doesn't make any sense. You create a tap by putting bottles and casks together, and then it puts itself into a keg? Your own cellar is a prototype for someone else's keg?

xyst
0 replies
1h32m

the brew creator was just really into beer crafting.

I probably do the same with some of my passion projects without realizing it

baking
1 replies
4h32m

Should have been called "pop-tarts."

youssefabdelm
0 replies
3h49m

They're not fun enough for a name like that

marssaxman
0 replies
3h12m

Thank you! That did puzzle me, especially because I had pulled some bread out of a toaster just seconds before sitting down to read Hacker News this morning.

FatalLogic
0 replies
2h56m

It's ironic that a person writing about poor communication paradigms didn't explain what "toast" means here.

It's the most important word on their page, and it's obvious that some people, even technically-minded folks, don't understand the jargon.

But could be they got extra engagement from readers who are interested in baking and breakfast recipes?

iambateman
8 replies
6h48m

Toasts are bad UX for an app which is used in a casual context, yes. The odds that an untrained user missed them and becomes confused are quite high.

But there is nothing wrong with a toast in a pro app. The pro user will get used to where feedback comes from on the screen and find it is second nature to notice the toast.

In practice, there are very few UX principles that generalize across every interface.

zachrip
2 replies
6h31m

I will say as someone with a limited visual field, toasts are very frustrating as they're almost always out of my field of view. Please keep indicators/notifications close to the thing that caused it.

iambateman
1 replies
5h12m

Serious question…when saving a document on a mac, the only visual indicator that the save happened is the red “close” button loses an interior circle.

This is 10x more subtle than any toast.

Do you wish that were different? Or does that work for you?

ervine
0 replies
4h41m

Aha fully-sighted and I've never noticed this... 15 years of mac use.

cqqxo4zV46cp
1 replies
6h15m

Classic. People that are bad at UX design using the “pro app” catch-all to justify all sorts of bad decisions.

I spend all day in “pro apps”. I am also visually impaired. The inappropriateness of toasts has nothing to do with my familiarity with the app. I may, eventually, learn that a particular UI is using toasts to indicate something. That doesn’t suddenly make it okay. They’re still a massive pain in the ass for me. They’re still a massive pain in the ass for a lot of people. They’re still a poorly thought out holdover from the days of 640x480 displays, and with a modern resolution they’re even less appropriate.

iambateman
0 replies
5h3m

You have also used a catch-all, but yours was personal and rude. The rest of your point is useful…just please remember that there are real people typing words into this app.

To respond to your point,

(1) is it a PITA because it’s hard to see something in the periphery or for some other reason? (2) Is there an example of a web app that you’ve noticed provides feedback very well? (3) would you consider a toast acceptable when the UX designer doesn’t consider the information critical? As in…the user can safely assume their action was accomplished but a little feedback is a nice sugar.

tuyiown
0 replies
6h42m

The pro will train himself to whatever good or bad thing you'll throw at him. The point is not about identifying generalization that works everywhere, it's just to have enough care for making the good choices at the right places.

lylejantzi3rd
0 replies
6h38m

Just because somebody will put up with it doesn't make it a good choice. That rationalization has been used to justify a lot of awful decisions and awful software.

JohnFen
0 replies
4h38m

I actually think the opposite. Toasts in my professional tools are even more objectionable to me. They're never where I'm concentrating, and by the time I realize one is happening and look at it, it's either already gone or is saying something trivial.

The end result is usually that I've been distracted for no reason.

In a casual app, none of this matters as much.

ervine
7 replies
6h48m

Maybe bad UX, but global error / success handling of network requests is way easier than handling in every component that triggers one.

Manfred
4 replies
6h35m

I don't think that's a convincing argument unless you are a tiny company that has to optimize for development time. You can also wonder why the frameworks you are using make this hard, because it's a pretty common to want feedback close to where the action happens.

dvdkon
1 replies
6h15m

I don't know anyone who isn't optimising for development time in some way. That said, most frameworks don't provide any worthwhile error handling infrastructure, and it's a problem.

In a Jetpack Compose app I wrote, I created generic "error barrier" components, so that error messages display over relevant parts of the app, with just a few lines each time, timeouts included. I think this is the best approach, easy for developers and informative for users. Too many apps just ignore errors.

Manfred
0 replies
54m

I meant optimizing for developer time over usability in the context of the story, that mostly shows products from Google. Google being the opposite of a small development team that could be forced to choose developer time over usability.

ervine
0 replies
6h24m

I didn't say it was hard, it's just very nice to not have a bunch of extra error / success code in all of your components that make async requests.

Trade offs, as usual.

epolanski
0 replies
6h19m

In my experience the overwhelming majority of teams out there are understaffed (especially when it comes to good and productive professionals) so your example is the rule, not the exception.

yxhuvud
1 replies
5h28m

Then refactor your app to make it easy. If it is hard in your tool, choose a different tool that make it easy.

ervine
0 replies
4h47m

Again, it's not hard - just being devil's advocate for when toasts are useful.

Less code, centralized messaging.

storafrid
5 replies
6h45m

The solutions seem to rely on a user that doesn't navigate before the action is completed. Does he propose locking the UI in the meantime, or to optimistically show the user a success result?

Y-bar
2 replies
6h23m

Debouncing is a known development tool for most non-immediate actions. It's related UI concept of locking individual UI elements is also well understood by many users (not by that technical name, but by "it's working on my action" kind of understanding).

optimistically show the user a success result?

I don't particularly like React, but this a core feature of such JS frontend frameworks, optimistically "succeed" while async network and back-end work happens to give the illusion of speed: https://react.dev/blog/2024/04/25/react-19#new-hook-optimist...

storafrid
1 replies
2h4m

Is this an LLM? :) The question was rhetorical. Both of these proposals have problems. But the main issue is that the author of the article is missing an angle of toasts as a UX concept.

Y-bar
0 replies
1h41m

From my perspective there was nothing rhetorical about that question as I occasionally encounter it as a serious thing. Some colleagues really do not want optimistic UI events. Some swear by them.

I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another as long as there is proper inline feedback.

gr__or
1 replies
6h35m

Came here for exactly this, the post is proposing a solution while only understanding one half of the problem.

Toasts are a global UI feedback mechanism for non-blocking/fallible/undo-able actions. That does make them out-of-place by default, but at least consistently so.

A solution I'd accept is local-view-first with toasts-as-fallback when the view is dismissed. That said, loading indicators _might_ make users hesitant to dismiss a view.

jagged-chisel
0 replies
6h23m

The dismissal should communicate to the user in a way that indicates the process will continue without the view.

david_allison
3 replies
6h21m

Snackbars aren't toasts

is_true
2 replies
4h37m

do you have a source for that? I understand that Toast is the name given in Android

is_true
0 replies
1h46m

That's the Android widget, not material design which is used for YouTube's UI

Y-bar
0 replies
6h21m

They even acknowledge the limitations and problems with Toasts:

1. Add inline feedback

Information in auto-dismissing snackbars must also be communicated using another accessible method inline or near the action that triggered the snackbar.
perlgeek
4 replies
6h18m

The "Undo" button in the toast is unnecessary because the user can just click the checkbox again

I disagree with this part, at least in general. Having an Undo is very good if you have accidentally clicked somewhere and don't know precisely where, and you don't know the application well enough to easily undo based on the message alone.

hk__2
2 replies
3h47m

In this specific example you do have an Undo button: the checkbox itself. The issue here is that the checkbox doesn’t match the exact state it’s supposed to represent: if you check it, for a few seconds it’s checked but the video is not yet saved; if you uncheck it it’s not unsaved until the toast appear. If you repeatedly check/uncheck it you don’t know in which state you end up.

hunter2_
1 replies
1h59m

In this specific example you do have an Undo button: the checkbox itself.

That's false. The checkbox itself is not a viable undo button under any circumstances in this specific example (i.e., you accidentally clicked but have no idea where, and let's assume you have no idea of that particular checkbox's state prior to the accident). Any adjacent checkbox would have extremely similar plausibility for a user wondering how to undo.

That said, toast is not great either, because it may disappear before the user fully recovers from their accident (say, a spilled drink). Maybe the undo button (and any async success/error labeling for the original event) ought to be adjacent to the checkbox and persist until the next action taken.

hk__2
0 replies
1h38m

i.e., you accidentally clicked but have no idea where, and let's assume you have no idea of that particular checkbox's state prior to the accident

That the same for every single checkbox in every single form on the Web.

Even in the unlikely case in which you clicked on the lists button that opens the popin and then accidently clicked on a checkbox without seeing which one and without seeing the checkbox state change, you still have the list of lists on the screen and you can still choose if you do want this video in this list(s) or not.

Terr_
0 replies
1h39m

Yeah, I've encountered that in a few systems: I'm aware I accidentally just changed the wrong thing but I don't know which wrong thing, there are no clues. This is especially problematic when there's a chance nothing changed, but you can't be sure.

To illustrate the problem with "perfect storm" example, suppose a your back is turned and a ball rolls of the shelf and hits the keyboard. Did anything change? What changed? How do you fix it?

marcodiego
4 replies
5h39m

There things worse than toasts: hidden slide panels. They are basically hidden toasts that are necessary for some actions and are completely unintuitive, unfindable and undiscoverable. My worst experience was with waze using the cellphone of someone else; I had to do something (don't remember what) and just stared at the screen (like a retard) trying to guess what I had to do; the person eventually got the phone, slid the hidden panel from the right and showed me what I had to do.

I understand how much this saves space, but it is absolutely ridiculous! How does an UX expert expects someone to guess that? Are current UI's supposed to be used by people who behave like children poking everywhere to discover things?

ChrisMarshallNY
1 replies
5h31m

I think most "toasts" (now I know the word for it!) are redundant and useless. I usually completely miss them. I think they are generally "harmless," but they should not be used to convey crucial information.

As for the "hidden panel," I have always assumed that this is a bug, but someone may have thought it was a good idea:

I use the Apple Connect App (for managing apps on the App Store) frequently.

If I use it on my iPad Mini, in portrait mode (how I usually use it), and select one of my apps, the back button often disappears, which means that I can't select another account (I have several), or another app within the current account.

Until I physically turn the iPad sideways.

Then, a Navigator appears on the left, and I can select other apps, or change accounts.

Frankly, I'm really quite disappointed in the whole UX for the Apple App Store backend (I'm not so thrilled with the frontend, either, but I use the backend all the time). It's a bit jarring, when you think about how much care they put into the rest of the user experience on the platform.

JamesSwift
0 replies
6m

Apple's non-hotpath UX (and even UI) is incredibly bad. The entire experience configuring icloud and family sharing on a Mac is like entering another dimension with no relation to the surrounding OS.

pphysch
0 replies
2h51m

I think the slide left/right for sidebar is a nice UX, as long as the user knows about it, and as long as you don't go beyond 1 main + 2 sidebars.

Discord mobile app used to have it for both left and right sidebars, and then a while ago someone had a brilliant idea that the "slide to reply" gesture was more important than navigating the app, and now you have to click a tiny ambiguous button to see the right sidebar.

everybodyknows
0 replies
2h24m

Fully agree. IOS of course, is full of them, even on tablets where screen space is abundant.

julienmarie
4 replies
6h5m

A toast makes sense only in 1 case: when it's a notification that is unrelated with the current action of the user. Similar to OS types of notification that the defunct Growl (memories) invented.

Any feedback from a user action should be done within the context of the user action. If the action is async, it should be clear and the feedback should instantaneously indicate that the action is queued for processing. In that case, the feedback should give 2 options: cancel and access the queue (or better give a vision of its progress ).

catapart
1 replies
5h56m

I'd add one more scenario: when the UI element that would give feedback, normally, has been removed, yet you still want to show feedback.

If I removed a task from a board, I can't show - on the task - how to undo that action. There's a keyboard shortcut to undo it, but how would the user know, visually?

I'm not going to replace the task with a note because notes don't belong in task lists - only tasks do. I'm not going to come up with some derivative task that only displays a message because then I'm injecting intention that has no function for the task component. I'm not going to just not tell the user because while it is obvious that the task was removed, it's not obvious how to undo what could be an alarming action from a single click (and I'm certainly not going to nag people before deleting a task with a single click; it's a core functionality of task lists. It needs to be able to be done instantly, and undone instantly).

So on and so forth. I'm sure people have tons of one-off, little, anecdotal examples like that. Toasts were invented for a reason. Just because people got cutesy with them doesn't mean they aren't specifically useful for specific scenarios, regardless of how contrived.

JamesSwift
0 replies
3h57m

Thats one reason for them. The other is for "not important enough to block the user, but important enough to inform them of something". What was previously a popup with an 'ok' button is now a toast. Low friction, medium importance.

peeters
0 replies
2h31m

If the action is async, it should be clear and the feedback should instantaneously indicate that the action is queued for processing. In that case, the feedback should give 2 options: cancel and access the queue (or better give a vision of its progress ).

Where should that feedback be given for modal operations, acknowledging that 99% of the time when the user initiates the action they want to background the operation and move on to doing other things?

creeble
0 replies
3h8m

Another example related to the current action of the user, but outside the scope of the currently-viewed screen: inserting a USB stick, or some other hardware-related function.

There is no context for this, and often an action is required. And even if not, it is certainly useful to confirm with the user that their action was detected.

Mackser
4 replies
7h33m

I haven't heard many developers/designers talk about the overused practice of using toasts for UI feedback.

The post shares a few real-world examples and illustrates some of the problems with how they use toasts.

What do you think? Are toasts overused? In which cases do you use them in your own apps?

Ukv
1 replies
6h42m

I'd speculate that their overuse comes from convenience of displaying any message by throwing in a `showToast("Foo!")` opposed to altering each UI component to show the relevant feedback.

maccard
0 replies
6h33m

That cuts both ways IMO. At least with a toast system I know where feedback appear on a per app basis (or website or whatever). Imagine if every screen, view, list entry, checkbox had its own way of displaying feedback. It would be an enormous amount of overhead.

unglaublich
0 replies
6h50m

Toasts should be used if there is no direct relation to or interaction with a visible UI element: notification, heavily asynchronous processes, out-of-view modifications.

JohnFen
0 replies
4h30m

Are toasts overused?

I think so, yes.

In which cases do you use them in your own apps?

I don't. But I don't write mobile apps (where they make more sense) for distribution, so they don't address any need my applications have.

layer8
3 replies
4h50m

For me the worse aspect is that they disappear (too quickly), and that they sometimes unnecessarily draw attention to themselves for success messages where you would trivially assume the action to succeed. The combination of the two is particularly vexing: Your attention gets unnecessarily diverted, but you don’t know if it wasn’t actually important because it disappeared too fast. Conversely, there’s also a variation where it stays on screen too long, obscuring a part of the UI you just wanted to see/use in that moment.

I like the traditional desktop approach where error messages are shown modally, so can’t be missed, and success messages are shown as normal unobtrusive text in the permanently displayed status bar, without timeout. When not getting an error modal, the user can simply assume that the action succeeded, but can look at the status bar for confirmation (plus potentially some auxiliary information), without any time pressure.

Some applications also offer a popup showing the history of status bar messages. In that approach, the status bar is like the last line of CLI terminal output, and you can call up previous output.

acjohnson55
1 replies
3h42m

To me, the imply that there's a hypothetical event log that I could view if I needed to look back to see what happened. In reality, that event log doesn't exist in an accessible way, and it's true that once the toast message times out, it's gone forever.

layer8
0 replies
3h11m

The log is just an optional added feature. The main point is for the current/last message not to disappear by itself, and to be displayed in a non-distracting and non-obstructive way.

hk__2
0 replies
3h50m

For me the worse aspect is that they disappear (too quickly), and that they sometimes unnecessarily draw attention to themselves for success messages where you would trivially assume the action to succeed. The combination of the two is particularly vexing: Your attention gets unnecessarily diverted, but you don’t know if it wasn’t actually important because it disappeared too fast. Conversely, there’s also a variation where it stays on screen too long, obscuring a part of the UI you just wanted to see/use in that moment.

Agreed; a better solution would be to assume success and show these messages only if an error occured.

Cthulhu_
3 replies
6h32m

Timed toasts are bad for accessibility too, see WCAG 2.2: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/#enough-time

Basically, the user should be able to configure toast messages; they should not autohide, or the time they hide should be adjustable, or they should be extendable within 20 seconds. TL;DR, self-hiding messages, dialogs, etc are not good for a11y.

That said, the toasts have a button where the user can undo the action taken, which is good for accessibility under criteria 2.5.2 and/or 3.3.4 / 3.3.6

taneq
2 replies
6h18m

It’s almost like we need a semantic level where the developer says “I want to send the use this small transient text message” and then a presentation level where a user can decide which method of presenting this information works best for them…

katzinsky
1 replies
6h15m

Email is nice.

But I don't want so many mails in my inbox

Then write mail rules. It's really easy and personally I couldn't survive at work without them. That's a big part of why it's nice: You can choose how it works unlike practically everything else these days.

JadeNB
0 replies
5h41m

That ties the app to be usable only with network access (which is fine for, e.g., Youtube, but not for all apps!), and also includes a highly variable lag.

xyst
2 replies
1h35m

I hate toasts too. I even dislike the name of this UI element - “toast”. Unlike a hamburger menu, the toast element doesn’t even resemble toasted bread slice. Or is it supposed to represent the short lived aspect of a toast between 2 parties?

Some sites even have toasts on mobile which block content. Have even tapped some of those actions by accident.

Also, since they are ephemeral. How does it impact a user on a screen reader? Is there an audio cue indicating a toast is on the screen?

codazoda
0 replies
1h33m

I think they are called toasts because they pop up from the bottom, similar to a piece of toast popping out of a pop-up toaster oven.

I used these to display errors in an internal web app once, which was a major mistake. The users almost never saw them and when they did they didn't see them long enough to be able to communicate what the message said, often trying to paraphrase.

I agree they are bad UX for most things.

apeescape
0 replies
1h32m

I think it's called a toast because it (usually) appears by jumping from one of the edges, like a piece of toast jumps from the toaster.

gherkinnn
2 replies
5h1m

I agree with post and don't like toasts either.

The thing is, they don't solve a UX problem as much act as a catch-all solution for "respond to user action". It is easier for orgs to shove everything in a toast than to think about more practical places to put the data.

samsolomon
0 replies
2h8m

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of toasts. And I generally agree with the sentiment that it would be better to have indicators closer to where the action was taken. But, I'm not sure how else I would approach this? I think the main benefit is the catchall approach allows the team to focus on other customer problems.

I lead the design system team for an enterprise SaaS company—there are so many controls across so many views. It's hard to imagine including a feedback mechanism like this in every component.

And I still think we'd need some sort of toast confirmation for deleted records?

gorjusborg
0 replies
3h3m

It's hard to agree/disagree on UX without all the application and domain context, but I do feel like toasts are valuable when you are communicating information to the user that is not tied to a fixed UI location/time, but do not want to force interaction (like you do with a modal).

I have seen modals used to communicate status and reaffirming information that does not require action, and between the two, toasts are a better fit. That said, you still need to be smart where the bar is in terms of what is worth communicating. None of us want applications to blather on about stuff we don't care about.

dagmx
2 replies
4h24m

I think the actual issue is that Google makes bad UX often, and not toasts in general.

Toasts themselves can be done well, but like every UI and UX element, they need to have some thought.

I know Google have some good UI (sometimes UX on Android) every now and then but they are so fractured as a company, with so much product and feature churn, that their UX is all over the place.

Every single Google app reinvents how things are done or communicated. Even within an app, it’ll do things differently because different teams implemented different features in the app since sections of an app might be shared with other apps.

Even Samsung offer a more cohesive experience. The most Google try and do is introduce new design guidelines every few years and then promptly have teams break them. Material design? Material You? Both barely touched UX but even with their own incredibly straight forward design rules, Google couldn’t adhere to them.

throwway120385
0 replies
3h14m

I completely agree. Every time I open any Google product it takes me a good 60 seconds to figure out that the hamburger menu is not where I go to create a new sheet/doc/slides. And then I have to scan around the screen for another symbol that's on the complete opposite corner of the screen and tastefully hidden away. It's very frustrating. 95% of the time when I go to sheets.google.com I go there to create a sheet, and their information hierarchy prioritizes looking at existing sheets, then navigating to another product, and then everything else, and then finally creating a document.

JamesSwift
0 replies
3h55m

I think the actual issue is that Google makes bad UX often, and not toasts in general.

Yeah, its wild because they were the ones who introduced the pattern to the general audience. And it was so successful that others started integrating it in non-material contexts. Toast and toast + action are here to stay, and for good reason, but I think google has individuals willy-nilly making design decisions and not quite being fully aware of how these elements should be used.

wruza
1 replies
3h52m

Taking youtube as an example is like taking a dead horse to a race. Youtube is an utter garbage ux-wise, both in bugs and features. Even fringe porn tubes are 10x more competent than youtube ui team.

Their latest “addition” was rewinding a video after a long pause. You watch a video, pause it at t=1:24:57 and go to sleep. Next day you start the video again and it goes for a while from t to t+n (depends on the buffered data), until it jumps back to t-20s.

Someone thought it’s a good idea to -20s after a long pause, and it might be good, if they assigned a proper developer to the task. Instead someone pushed an obviously idiotic change, without anyone checking. It’s not even an issue, it’s clearly “job done” by someone who couldn’t give a lesser fuck due to ieee754 limitations.

You cannot avoid that behavior. If you go forward/back or manually jump elsewhere, it still resets you to t-20s shortly after. You might think you just reload the page, but reliably saving the current position is not in their competence either.

That and a dozen other stupid bugs they fiddle with constantly but can never fix. Literally on a site with a sidebar and a grid of equally-sized elements. Their thumbnail card alone takes 7.5 pages (17KB) of html.

ziml77
0 replies
2h51m

I don't think there's any feature there with the video jumping back. That purely seems to be a bug where it fails to resume the connection to the server to continue filling the buffer. It seems to hit the end of what is buffered and then refresh, causing it to jump back to some last saved position.

snarfy
1 replies
5h44m

They are bad UX if I can't disable them. I universally hate all notifications. Stop stealing my attention. It's cognitive abuse bordering on violence. If I want to know I will go look, you don't need to shove it in my face.

lagniappe
0 replies
5h39m

It's cognitive abuse bordering on violence

Take a breath

mlsu
1 replies
1h24m

The need for this sort of disappears if the thing being displayed (client) is actually coupled to the application state. Toasts are bad UX, yes. But the reason they exist is that we have one state on the server and then another pseudo-state on the client. Keeping them in sync via code locality in every component is extremely difficult.

So we come up with a workaround -- put async server updates in only one place in the application -- to get around this fundamental issue. In 99% of cases, this isn't about UX, it's about engineering. Nobody wants to put toasts in; they must, because managing state is too difficult otherwise.

It's a symptom of the larger issue.

If instead what's displayed on screen is simply the server's application state returned by the server, the user will always know what's happening with the server.

HATEOAS

switchbak
0 replies
1h5m

HATEOAS is more about a standard, discoverable and consistent way to navigate around resources in a RESTful fashion. Which is nice, even if it didn't really catch on to a large degree. I think that's somewhat orthogonal to he point you're making.

I think your point is good though, that an ephemeral toast message is a cheap way to avoid having to manage and expose the underlying state. Exposing that via a HATEOAS REST API would be even better!

leke
1 replies
20m

I think it's a middle path thing. I like toast error messages but for simple confirmation actions like Saved, Deleted and Copied, the text change is better. HTMX makes this really easy to do :)

quectophoton
0 replies
8m

I like error messages that I can copy-paste without worrying that they might disappear too fast, or worse, when I click on it. Also error messages that I can screenshot to show someone else without having to hurry because it might disappear after 50ms.

cryptonector
1 replies
1h24m

OP doesn't actually identify what is problematic with the toasts! The `The Problems with the YouTube Toast` section merely describes what OP sees, not what is bothersome to OP. I'm guessing that the issue is all the different locations on the page where things happen: the control, the dialog, and the toast are all over the place, thus maybe that is distracting to OP. In that case the issue is about UI element placing, not really about the toasts.

Toasts help communicate that an operation completed asynchronously after giving control back to the user without making them wait in a modal dialog. This is a very good UI/UX, especially now that users are trained to understand that asynchrony.

jeroenhd
0 replies
1h20m

While I'm in favour of asynchronous feedback like this, placing toasts nowhere near the button you've clicked is confusing when you get to bigger monitors. A toast in the bottom left on a large, widescreen 4k monitor can literally be half a meter away from the place you clicked, so the toast might as well not have been there. I myself have lost the progress notification for a file copy in KDE because it was placed all the way in the bottom right corner, and my screen isn't even _that_ big.

A little popover near the button makes more sense. Or, in this case, simply disabling the checkbox until the asynchronous action has completed, and using the non-disabled state to indicate success (or show a useful error message when the operation fails).

choward
1 replies
6h13m

"We do have to consider the undo-functionality and that the toast feedback can be useful when using keyboard shortcuts."

There's nothing more infuriating than going to click undo and the toast disappears.

nirui
0 replies
4h18m

It's the most annoying thing I felt when I using software too. So in my own project, I tend to just keep the message open and wait for user to decide what do to with it, but then that's not a toast anymore.

I don't think designers should put anything interactive in an arbitrarily timed interface aside from "Dismiss". A toast is the best when it's displaying what is currently going on, not as a pop up dialog box.

The best design for Undo I think is to make it a dedicated button, like the one in the text editors. When user clicked "Archive", a Toast pop up and displays message "Archiving N entries, please wait" and then change it to "N entries archived. You can press Control+C or click [Undo Icon] to undo if that was a mistake" then the Undo button lights up.

Also, IMO the message format "Archiving N entries, please wait" should be a standard, it tells the user in a clear way 1) what the software is doing, and 2) what should I the user do. On the other hand, the message "Conversation archived" don't really provide the same value, since user already saw it happened.

agumonkey
1 replies
5h1m

Reminds me that old programs, be it Maya, Emacs, or even MFC days had a status bar for most simple notifications.

JohnFen
0 replies
4h33m

Status bars are a far superior option for this sort of thing than toasts. As another commenter said, toasts appear to be a UX compromise that was necessitated by mobile (where a status bar is tough), but has sadly infected desktops as well.

adamc
1 replies
3h0m

Good piece. I've experienced this in many contexts, and widescreen monitors make it a bigger problem.

ilrwbwrkhv
0 replies
2h58m

Toasts which incorporate movement such as slide up are far more noticeable compared to fade in toasts since human vision is far better at recognizing movement. Even on large screens it is pretty good.

Spivak
1 replies
2h54m

The number of people and voracity that toasts are being defended in this thread is quite surprising given how terrible of a UI element they are. They don't exist anywhere in the document hierarchy so users have to mentally piece together what they're connected to, they carry no context, and they happen long (in computer time) after the action that that caused them.

Toasts are a solution to "I did something async and don't know how to design an actually good UI to convey that." And having a UI element for that is pretty darn useful because of how often that situation comes up. All of our default UI metaphors buttons/checkboxes/input boxes are all synchronous— either updating local state to be saved synchronously with a button or synchronously in real time (like setting a preference cookie). It's just that the web forced async-by-default on everyone without updating anything else.

If you show a user a checkbox it's absurd that such a thing can fail or not apply immediately, you're emulating a paper form, how does checking a box fail? Same with flipping a switch. Even if the light doesn't come on the switch is still flipped. None of these elements make sense to be backed by a request/response.

In the example in the article when the user changes one of their settings a save button appears, when you click it there's a progress bar or spinner, and when it finishes it says "Saved!" We figured this out in Windows 95. Quit trying to hide the form submission. The need for toasts is trying to tell you your abstraction is leaking.

Blot2882
0 replies
2h13m

They don't exist anywhere in the document hierarchy so users have to mentally piece together what they're connected to, they carry no context, and they happen long (in computer time) after the action that that caused them.

To me, the context is the thing I just did. I can't say I'm particularly confused with toasts. Without them, I find myself looking for confirmation on page more often.

Also to the user, they happen instantaneously. Who cares if the fade-in is slow in computer time?

Brosper
1 replies
5h1m

OMG yes! I feel the same. I think that sometimes product owners don't use the products.

supportengineer
0 replies
38m

Result of promo-driven culture

zombot
0 replies
6h4m

It's not like we've had decades and decades of GUI experience where every problem has already been solved. Also, this week's "designer" is smarter than everyone before them -- time to reinvent the wheel!

yieldcrv
0 replies
52m

those toasts are bad UX

whartung
0 replies
2h4m

Let me share the dark side of Toasts.

World of Warcraft has these, they're used for lots of things. Notably achievements and things like that. There's also add on that look for rare monsters and pop up when it detects one while you're flying about in the land, loot drop announcements

However, we just went through a special event called "Remix" which basically offered degenerate gameplay. Absurdly powerful characters, loot raining from the sky. And in this event, the common reward was a chest filled with gear and other things. These chests came from everywhere.

When you opened a chest, if it had piece of gear, you'd get a little toast.

Now, when you're boucing about collecting boar livers and rousting out hoodlums from their huts, it was quite easy to collect dozens of these things.

And, being WoW players, not known for their patience, you simply collect them all and open them all at once. Open your bags, and right click away. From this, your UI simply explodes with toasts. And they're all queued up, you can only see so many at a time, like, perhaps, 5. And they slowly fade, making room for others.

They dominate roughly 30% of the screen real estate (when presented in volume), smack in the center. And you can either wait it out (which takes a long time), or madly right click to dismiss them all. Me, I would simply go to the inn, open them all up, and log out (which is instant in an inn), and log back in. That would flush the queue of toasts.

Similarly, if you log into a zone, particularly a quiet zone, it's not uncommon for the screen to explode with alerts telling you of all the rare monsters that are simply sitting there because the zone is very quiet for players.

Finally, there a grouping queue you can join for group content, and you can queue for more than one event at a time. So, it's not uncommon to finish one event, kill the boss, the screen explodes with your loot, others loots, maybe a boss achievement, followed by a booming horn with a dialog telling you your new event is ready for you. The entire UI is just a cacophony of alerts.

Toast are mostly fine in my experience, but they do not work when applied in volume.

webdevladder
0 replies
5h55m

I tend to agree but I think toasts can still be useful and good UX. Putting useful and actionable feedback in context instead of toasts is a rule of thumb that I try to follow but it's not always appropriate.

For undo-able actions, toasts disappearing too fast or colliding with other toasts badly is a real problem. An affordance to see the toast history with non-disappearing undo buttons may be more to implement but for a lot of apps, a viewable and editable history combined with toasts is a much better UX than either system on its own.

toxik
0 replies
5h3m

Toasts on smartphones are worse, it happens so incredibly often that YouTube obscures part of the video that I want to see with an unnecessarily large toast to tell me I did a thing. Most notably, switching quality. Or just now I enabled a beta test feature, it gave me a toast. Why?! I know what I did. The same if I click the same button again to disable the feature. At least you can dismiss them by dragging them down.

thomastjeffery
0 replies
3h28m

It may not be as fun or polished, but a log is much much better UX.

teqsun
0 replies
6h20m

Toasts can be bad UX (usually when they are the sole feedback), but they are great in conjunction with other elements.

A confirmation toast with a page-redirection is a great way to add additional indication to the user that their submission was successful.

A warning or error toast in addition to standard form validation indicators gives a great secondary indication to the user that they need to change something.

And if implemented in a catch-all for nonspecified errors, it'll allow the user to preserve the state of their page vs rerouting to an error page.

If used as one tool in the toolbox vs the only tool in the toolbox, it's a great option.

taeric
0 replies
1h57m

As long as the "toast" section is reused for many different messages, I don't get the problem? Ideally, you'd embrace that there is a common spot to see informational items. Even more ideally, you'd have a way to view all of the notifications that have been shown. (Emacs user entering the conversation...)

I confess I was completely at a loss as to what a Toast was, though. I suppose we went with that name because they pop up?

suyash
0 replies
6h12m

It's an effective UX tool for smaller screens like how it was created for Android phones, in larger displays it doesn't work as effectively.

steve_adams_86
0 replies
1h37m

I think there’s a critical distinction to make here.

Some UI can model what the users interacting with accurately enough that updating the state of the model is a great way to communicate changes. If you remove an item from a list, you can demonstrate success through that interaction without using a toast.

On the other hand, sometimes the UI doesn’t reflect the model at all and there’s no sensible way to communicate with the user what has occurred outside of something like a toast.

The trouble is, you get inconsistent feedback mechanisms if you leverage both online feedback and toast feedback.

If this was an easy problem one way or the other, I’m fairly confident we’d have seen a convergence of implementations at some point and everyone would use a fairly common convention. It’s not that easy, though.

Good UX is really hard. People thinking it’s this simple are actually why I stopped doing it as much. Back end programming gives you so much more freedom to explore problems and people respect it to some degree. With UI/UX, especially UI design, everyone seems to think they know better already.

shahzaibmushtaq
0 replies
5h56m

YouTube toast is a bad UX and French toast is always a good UX.

seanvelasco
0 replies
4h3m

I only use a toast for displaying error messages that otherwise displace UI elements on the page

I never found toasts to be bad UX

effective use of toasts is to confirm to that a big change that they initiated was successful. for smaller changes, like checking or unchecking a checkbox, toasts are redundant

rkagerer
0 replies
6m

Toasts would be alright if they showed up in a dedicated portion of the UI (eg. status bar) which had a notification history so that you don't feel like you're racing a clock to read an unwanted popup trying to steal your attention.

replete
0 replies
5h6m

Notifications are good. Notifications that are temporally disconnected from actions (e.g. debounced, cooled down) are suboptimal - but its what people are used to. Getting rid of notifications altogether is not an improvement. In his example, the notification is basically a confirmation of a direct action. Notifications don't always feedback instantly

qwertox
0 replies
6h21m

YouTube has even better examples.

Go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/history and click "Comments" on the right side. Then delete one comment.

You will get one toast indicating that it will be deleted, and one a second or two later indicating that it got deleted.

If you delete multiple comments quickly one after another, you'll first get a bunch of toasts indicating that the comment will be deleted, and then, with that second or two delay, each confirmation, but they do get deleted sequentially, so you have to wait for all the confirmation toasts. Which for a deletion of 10 comments will take more than 10 seconds, even if you clicked them all in two or 3 seconds.

Same with the live comments at

https://myactivity.google.com/page?page=youtube_live_chat&co...

plorg
0 replies
3h7m

My biggest annoyance with toasts is when they are undismissible and cover other UI elements. Instagram (in their menu system) is a particular offender.

phartenfeller
0 replies
6h48m

Strongly agree. I guess toasts work better for mobile screens as they are smaller and mostly vertical, so the element spans the whole screen width. If it needs to be there and should be responsive, I would prefer it to be an alert in the upper-right corner of big screens.

mattdesl
0 replies
6h10m

To play devils advocate:

- if your app has a number of messages (eg: “image downloaded” or “message sent” or whatever) then there is a consistency in using toasts as they all appear in the same predictable manner

- often “appear away from focus” is one of the intended goals of a toast; it’s a message that is present, but more in the periphery (the user can ignore in most cases, and it doesn’t obscure main content)

lproven
0 replies
1h52m

I did not like this. This is why:

* Embedded example video doesn't work on Firefox.

* Reasoning reads more like post-hoc justifications to me.

* Last and most important: does not explain what "toasts" are.

Aside: The word in its default English usage is not countable. Making a plural means it must be the usage of clinking glasses of alcoholic drink, to indicate a salutation to a person or thing.

They seem to mean "toaster notifications". I only know this as an option in Pidgin. I Googled it and found this:

https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/toast-notifications-how-to-make...

That page suggests that this bad, broken English is a standard usage in some niche community or communities. IMHO that doesn't excuse it.

loughnane
0 replies
4h50m

But by archiving the email, the email disappears from the list, which already implies the action was successful.

In this example, the button already includes a confirmation so the toast is entirely unnecessary.

Double-encoding information is good if the information is really important so long as the two ways you encode it always and only appear together. You see this in data visualization a bunch (think a bubble chart where larger circles also become a more saturated red).

Sure it doesn't satisfy some platonic ideal of purity, but for a distracted user it can lessen their cognitive load and so can be good UX.

The point about distance is interesting. Toasts popping up near the action could be neat.

lawgimenez
0 replies
1h30m

This is called a Snackbar now.

l5870uoo9y
0 replies
4h33m

In the examples shown, toasts are misused to display low-quality notifications, e.g. “x has been copied!”. Using toasts to display relevant error messages alleviates several problems:

- they work well in an otherwise cluttered user interface (error messages often break layouts)

- they allow the data layer to be substantially simplified, e.g. no need to store errors, error setters, error getters in Redux or similar

- they allow programmers to implement error handling toasts once and use everywhere

krysp
0 replies
4h30m

I really like the short and visually descriptive layout of this article. It clearly conveys the message. I'm not in agreement that toasts are always bad though.

It can be useful to follow an expected pattern; users are likely to understand that a toast gives feedback for an action they have taken. Although other ways exist to accomplish this, they will follow different formats depending on the action (by necessity).

As with lots of design, expected patterns change over time. Although they are non-local, toasts are familiar.

katzinsky
0 replies
6h41m

My main complaint is that on Firefox on Linux anyway they actually steal the mouse position along with keyboard focus. So if you're using something like instagram's IM it's really hard to type while getting replies.

joduplessis
0 replies
6h2m

I would say the article is a bit nit-picky IMO. For every pattern there are probably dozens of poor-use examples. I personally really like the Gmail undo mechanism.

jmull
0 replies
3h48m

HM...

The redesign of the "Save" operation is better than the original, where the checkbox list is positioned in context, and there is an indicator for the async operation.

But I think it would be better if it kept the toast. When the operation completes successfully, presumably the async indicator just disappears. That has no impact and a toast fixes that.

Also, presumably the operation can fail. I suppose you'd replace the async indicator with a red X or something, and maybe revert the checkbox. But it would be useful if there could be a textual description of what went wrong, and a toast is a nice and consistent way to present that.

jasonlotito
0 replies
5h43m

The Solution: No Toast

His solution ignores the undo component of the toast. Simply adding it back to the playlist is not a solution as that reorders it in the playlists. Instead, undo puts it back into the playlist where it was. When you have longer play lists, this becomes even more critical.

I'd much prefer a consistent way of interact than a bespoke unique way of using every UI component. Consistency and correctness versus creativity and confusion.

jacknews
0 replies
5h45m

Sorry I have no idea what he's even talking about after the first couple of paragraphs and screenshots, so while I'm very interested in good UX, I'm left thinking this author is not an expert practitioner.

jFriedensreich
0 replies
4h42m

As always when there is a clickbaity title that you think cannot be true it just lacks any nuance. Toasts are for displaying updates on things that happen OFF SCREEN, eg when doing something that takes a while and navigating to another screen. In addition toasts require a home for context to work propperly. This can either be a stack of toasts for very simple applications or a notification sidebar that can be accessed from a bell icon or similar. Toasts need to be shown close to this entry point to their home, not on an opposite position of the screen. The 2 most common mistakes are: a) show toasts for things that happen on screen instead of showing feedback in the actual action UI (its fine to keep them in addition for consistnecy) b) not have a home where a user can see what happened combined with autohiding toasts after a few seconds. (i cannot count how often i saw some dangerous looking error toast but could not read it in time, leaving me with a bad feeling especially for important things like admin UIs)

icar
0 replies
4h8m

I completely agree that it being far away from the interaction point is bad UX. That said, toasts by themselves are not bad, it depends where they are.

hermitdev
0 replies
3h40m

Just wait until the author sees the toasts in MS Teams. I expect his head will explode.

Teams has, hands-down in my opinion, _the_ worst usage of toasts that I've seen. It's bad enough I get the OS toast from Teams, that may or may not disappear on its own after a time (on both Windows and Linux). However, there's also an in-app toast that blocks part of UI that is used the most: replying to messages. Literally, typing a reply, then boom, toast appears, blocks most of the buttons used to interact with your reply. (formatting, emoji/gifs, attachments and even the reply button!)

hddqsb
0 replies
4h22m

I thought this was going to be about Android (which makes heavy use of that term), and I was expecting completely different complaints:

- The toast disappears quickly, so you might not have time to read it / take a screenshot

- It's not possible to copy the text

- Long text is truncated (e.g. exception messages)

h1fra
0 replies
2h14m

Toast are used for two reasons:

- An action has a destructive operation that you can't easily undo because the main button has disappeared (i.e: delete, reset, confirm a popup, etc.)

- Displaying a message would break the UI somehow (i.e: error message in a list, near a button in nav bar, in a tight UI, etc.)

I honestly don't feel like they are the best, and most of the time they are useless, but from time to time they are handy.

game_the0ry
0 replies
40m

IMO, not a great take.

Author's alternative suggestion isn't that that great either - the problem with having a loading indicator next to an actionable item in a list is that if you get an error, it would be difficult to communicate what went wrong to the user (if you wanted to do that).

If the author considered why services like Google and almost every UI library, from Bootstrap to MUI, has some sort of toast/alert message, then I think the argument of toasts as bad UX could be better articulated.

Seems like author's take is more personal opinion than analytical conclusion.

Personally, I like the UX of toast + alerts.

fortran77
0 replies
17m

Watching my 91 year old mother try to use a computer, I can messages that flash up and then disappear are extremely bad for individuals with slower reaction and processing times.

epolanski
0 replies
6h23m

This does not consider errors, especially non-recoverable ones (server problems, bugs) where imho it's hard to design.

einpoklum
0 replies
10m

Somehow, those YouTube "toasts" always manage toi come up over the play control, when I need to use the controls. I think they're magic.

dejawu
0 replies
16m

The worst toast I've seen is on Android Auto (itself already a veritable petri dish of awful UX) where, when the on-screen keyboard appears, a toast helpfully pops up informing you that a keyboard is also available on your phone... Thus blocking the on-screen keyboard from being used until the toast fades (and no, tapping it does not dismiss it).

bluesmoon
0 replies
36m

I came here thinking there was a new recommendation for making toast, or at least a recommended type of bread to use, but I found nothing edible.

authorfly
0 replies
4h37m

If I am honest, the main reason I use toasts at first is because it ensures mobile compatibility. The problems with mobile UI (dismiss X offscreen, feedback off screen, user refreshed the SPA app page ruining state etc) are less likely to occur with a toast. They also bring some element of tolerable, expected animation (like 'page loader bars') which newbies often miss, and make the experience less jarring as a result.

Yes it's not great UX but it functions consistently well. Although 80% of the applications we use day-to-day may be by big corps with excellent UX and time to spend on it, 80% of applications built never get round to even consistent and fairly error-free UX. So I consider reaching that stage more important that adhering to a beautiful, but more risky, cross-platform UX strategy when in early stages with limited resources.

anentropic
0 replies
6h29m

this seems like an example of a mobile interaction pattern being blindly applied to desktop site

TehShrike
0 replies
3h35m

I agree with the article, but I think there's a greater principle here that it misses – UI that obscures other UI is bad UX.

It's a lazy cop-out to avoid having to figure out how to integrate important elements into the design of your page.

I find Google/Material Design's floating action buttons very frustrating.

KenArrari
0 replies
3h59m

I think a lot of this makes sense when it's made for mobile, while desktop users are using increasingly large monitors.

KTibow
0 replies
4h13m

I wouldn't want to implement the suggested YouTube UI (menu showing up next to button) because it's the kind of thing that has the most potential to glitch out. Dialogs generally don't glitch out as they're absolutely positioned and can be handled by the browser.

JohnFen
0 replies
4h45m

That's a decent list of some of the problems with them. Toasts are my second most hated UI element. The ribbon is my most hated.

JamesSwift
0 replies
4h11m

Basically all of these are examples of 'bad UX is bad UX'. Sure, don't show a toast when another confirmation already appears. And dont make them async to appear. And dont include undo for something that is able to be easily undone. The toast for archive with the 'undo' _is specifically when you should be using this_.

For context, I'm coming from the world of native apps. Toasts overall, especially with the 'undo' action, have been a very useful contribution by Google to UX. Compared to iOS's "show a blocking popup in the middle of the screen", they were so much nicer. Like I said, the "undo" for cases like the archive example are the whole point! Instead of asking "are you sure?" for everything, you just delay the action and offer an undo. Default to the user being sure they wanted to perform that action and dont gatekeep their flow. Dont overuse it, but dont blame its bad uses on the toast itself.

INTPenis
0 replies
4h20m

If you're analyzing the youtube UI I can show you a lot worse issues than the toasts lol. That's a minor issue. I consider myself a heavy youtube user for over a decade and to summarize; Youtube doesn't care about UX.

Yesterday they added a sleep timer, yesterday! A feature that shouldn't take more than a day to develop. But it's highly valuable to a large number of users, Youtube doesn't care. Good UX is only valuable as long as they can make a profit from it.

Ennea
0 replies
1h59m

A blog post about bad UX that has a video element with controls hidden and autoplay. With autoplay disabled, it can take a while to figure out this thing is a video that just isn't playing...