Better Notifications?

[Guest Zephyr]

I have been wondering if notifications can be tweaked to reduce repetition and redundant text, and improve the organisation and readability of notifications. I present my own ideas about how that might be accomplished in hope that others will chime in with thoughts and contributions.

Proposed changes to notifications:

• Group unread notifications of the same type and date.
  The unread notifications number displayed on the side menu should still reflect the number of unread events (not the number of unread notifications/grouped notifications)
• Separate the date and time into separate columns (add another column for time).
  The width of the first date column can be reduced slightly, and the second time column can be even smaller.
• Change the date format to day and month name instead, e.g. "14 April".
  The current date format is almost entirely limited to use in the US and thus makes an unusual choice for an internationally engaged game, confusing to anyone outside the US. Furthermore, day and month shorthand (absent year) is itself an unusual and uncommon date format (at least in my experience). This change would make dates completely unambiguous to players from anywhere.
• Change the time format to 24 hour time, e.g. "23:44" instead of "11:44 pm".
  The 24 hour time format has the benefit of being shorter as it drops the need for the meridiem indicator and thus takes up less space, and is logically more consistent as the hour always increments and thus arguably easy and unambiguous to understand. It is also used throughout the world, often a standard in workplaces, and thus familiar to most.
• Remove the superfluous explanation field at the top of the notification page to reclaim more vertical space.
  I'm talking about this. It is self-evident what the page's function is and does not require a description. The only arguable value added is that it indicates that each section only shows 125 records. You could however just add this in parentheses to each section header, e.g. "Recent Activity (Last 125 Records)", "System Activity (Last 125 Records)". Though even this is misleading as when I review my notifications page it is clear each section does not show the last 125 records. As such, I would forgo mentioning how many records should be expected in each section (maybe just put it on a wiki page if it's that important to document). It also makes less sense to me to limit notifications by a set number and more if it were the last 7 day's notifications.
• The general format of grouped notifications would consist of 3 columns; date, time, description:
  • First column; date
    Date of the grouped notifications. This is vertically expanded from the first row across the rows below so that the date is only presented once and keeps clutter minimal (subsequent rows do not display date again).
  • Second column; time
    Time of a specific event. The initial notification description (first row) is expanded across the time column and the third description column. Events of the same type are then appended on new rows below with time logged in the time column and description in the third column.
  • Third column; description
    Describes an event that generated a notification.
• The initial description for grouped notifications should contain appropriate links on the keywords embargoed, trade, war, aided, and achievements.
  For example in, "Your nation completed TRADE with:", the word "TRADE" could link to the My Trade Offers page to improve ease of navigation. Likewise EMBARGOED to the list of nations that have embargoed one's nation, WAR to one's war page, AIDED to one's bank activity page, and ACHIEVEMENTS to one's achievements page.
• Some changes to the way notifications are formatted.
  See the screenshot included below for examples.
• Unread grouped notifications are ordered by their last event notification time.

Reasons for changes:

• Reduce repetition and redundant text.
• More concise.
• Reduce ambiguity.
• Improve the organisation and presentation of events of the same type.
• Improve readability.
• Reclaim more vertical screen space.
• Looks better?

Please take a look at the screenshot below which I made to help illustrate my ideas on how grouped notifications would look:

Image Link (in case it's difficult to properly view on the forum)

Because someone will say it if I don't, "This would be low priority for Alex if he even likes it".

I think with this approach notifications could look tidier, and I like the idea of grouping the same type of information to make it easier to quickly appreciate who did what. I think, for example, it'd be nice to see attack information grouped and uninterrupted so that one can more easily appreciate the series of attacks their nation was subjected to while they were gone. This approach also just removes some repetition which I think improves readability. I am tempted to argue that with this approach the other sections below Recent Activity on the notifications page could be removed entirely so that the Recent Activity notifications extend the whole page length.

Anyhow, awaiting feedback on how silly this is.

[Mohammad]

I wish this is how my notifications were being popped up.

[JadenStar10]

@Alex Please Implement This

[Prefontaine]

@Adrienne Another one for the QoL list. Medium/high importance!