iOS badges ONLY for mentions & announcements

Created by: ffxsam

Right now I'm getting badge updates simply when there are new unread messages in various rooms, even though I've got them set to only notify me when I'm mentioned or there's an announcement. Other than that, the update is looking awesome!

Created by: trevorah

I'm guessing you mean this badge:

Yeah, I can understand where you are coming from. You get activity circles for rooms that you are lurking in, but you don't want to have a big app badge alerting you to them.

I personally find it difficult to know what the best user experience is for badges is as there are so many styles of users (some want an empty inbox, some just want to read to clear badges, some are cool with unreads etc.). @mydigitalself @ricardobaeta do you two have any insights?

Personally I think we have the best balance. Most apps do it for the number of unread messages which i find a little overzealous.

Now we've seen two schools of thoughts on showing unread badges - some people want them for rooms that are set to Announcements and others have expressed the desire not to have them this way. We could in the future consider introducing a fourth setting Quiet which sits above Mute, but below Announcements that effectively behaves like this (doesn't track unreads, hence no badge) but still notifies for announcements.

Created by: ffxsam

I think the solution to the badge thing is pretty clear. Look at the notification options in the Gitter application:

So the behavior should be:

• All: badge count represents # of unread messages
• Announcements: badge count represents # of unread mentions and announcements
• Mute: badge count represents # of unread mentions

@ffxsam When we first launched these notification settings, that's how we had it and there was overhwhelming feedback that people wanted to know about the number of unread messages, but just not get notified.

Sadly, there's differing opinions if badge = notification. For instance, in WhatsApp, even in a muted conversation, you still get badge counts for the unreads, just not notified.

I entirely see your side, as I do the other side.

Created by: ffxsam

Well, you know what they say: when the users are divided, make it an option! :)

Exactly:

We could in the future consider introducing a fourth setting Quiet which sits above Mute, but below Announcements that effectively behaves like this (doesn't track unreads, hence no badge) but still notifies for announcements.

Created by: thomaslazar

I see the badge as an indicator that something needs/wants my attention. So I chose the Announcement option thinking that i only get a notification and a dot in the badge when something got announced or @-mentioned. Slack has this "Only direct messages and highlight words" option which behaves in exactly this way. That's why i was expecting it to work similarly here as well. Slack counts @-mentions as direct message. So i guess having a Quiet option to get this behaviour would be fine and not upset ppl wanting the current behaviour.