Legacy Maemo 5 Documentation/Human Interface Guidelines/Notes and Banners
Contents |
Notes and Banners
When it is necessary to show information to the user, either to give some information or to ask for confirmation, you should use notes and banners.
This type of widgets constitute some kind of intrusion into the user's space and therefore must not be used except where strictly necessary.
Banners and notes differ in the way they are presented to the user, being the most relevant difference that the former don't require any user interaction in order to be dismissed. Notes, on the other hand, will always require user interaction before being closed. For this reason, it is advised to use banners only to display temporarily relevant information, that the user may safely skip or ignore after some time.
Information Notes
Information notes are modal dialogs that display information to the user and have no buttons - the user simply presses the screen and the note disappears.
Figure 3: An information note
This kind of notes should be only used when the user attention is required - for information the user must read. For example, an application may have finished an important task and needs to provide the user with some information gathered during that task.
The usage of this type of note should be rare.
Confirmation Notes
Information notes are modal dialogs that display information to the user and have no buttons - the user simply presses the screen and the note disappears.
Figure 4: An confirmation note
These notes should be used when the application is about to perform some tasks that might lead to an undesired action like destroying data, compromising security or taking a long time. Unlike information notes, confirmation notes only disappear after a user response, that is, they won't go away until the user presses one of the note's buttons.
Its usage should be moderate or even configurable by the user. For example, on the preferences dialog of an application there might be a way to configure if it should ask for confirmation when the user quits the application.
Note Buttons
Confirmation notes should normally ask a question whose answer should be "Yes" or "No", so, this is the text that the note's buttons should have.
Keep the buttons ordering consistent across your application, that is, don't set the "Yes" button as the first button in a confirmation note and as the second button in other notes.
Banner
Banners are used to display an information for a period of time. This type of notification should be used to display non critical information, for example that a certain task is finished or that an application state has changed.
The period of time that a banner takes to disappear can be adjusted. However, that time should not be excessive as it is an intrusive form of telling the user something.
Figure 5: A banner
Banners should be distinguished from the system's own banners, that is, they should suggest to the user which application they belong to. This can be done by even displaying the application's name or by making it clear in the message's text.