The delivery of system events to the actor’s attention, balancing awareness against interruption. As one of three ways to give status feedback, every notification has three parts: purpose, type, and scope.
Purpose
Signifies the intention and the emotional tone of the information being communicated. Each status is associated with a specific color and icon, ensuring a consistent and universal user experience.
- Information
- Success
- Warning
- Error
Type
Allows to tailor the disruptiveness of the notification.
Inline
Toast
Toasts provide quick, at-a-glance feedback on the outcome of an action.
Callout
Callouts are used to highlight important information contextually.
Dialog
Used only when the message is critical and needs the user’s immediate attention or action. Modals persist until users engage with them and only disappear when dismissed by the user.
Notification panel
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Scope
Contextual
Localised messages tied to a specific place, providing timely feedback or updates relevant to the user’s immediate context.
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Global
System-wide alerts that inform the user about events or statuses affecting the entire application, regardless of their current location within it.
Decision tree
Resources & references
- W3C WAI-ARIA — Alert pattern
- Carbon Design System
- Lightning Design System
- Material Design
- Apple Developer Documentation
Consequences
- a delivery surface tuned to the event's urgency and the actor's availability
Related patterns
Serves
- Delegation — delegation's primary communication channel — how a background agent reaches the actor
- Modality — chooses where on modality's gradient a signal lands
Enacts
- Temporality — when information arrives, and how disruptive the timing of its arrival is
Complements
- Activity feed — alerts users to new feed activity requiring attention
- Collaboration — Notifications keep collaborators informed of changes and events in shared environments
- Commenting — alerts users to comment activity
- Next-best action — a common delivery mechanism for next-best action prompts
Related
- Deletion — Alerting about deletion events
- Handoff — a handoff to an actor who isn't watching arrives as a notification
- Status feedback — status feedback for events the actor didn't trigger and isn't watching; pushed, not pulled
- Prose
- Transient feedback — the coordination pattern that selects delivery type and disruption level; its decision tree routes dismissible, non-actionable messages here
Preceded by
- Localization — localised message content, timing conventions
- Settings — alerts actors to settings-related changes, particularly in shared configuration contexts
- Workspace — some of the actor's work is now somewhere they aren't looking, and changes there won't be seen until they switch — which is what has to reach across the boundary