Hello everyone,
This is a piece of feedback & suggestion regarding the feed of the users we follow on itch.io!
Context
As you may already know, if you follow other itch.io players or creators, some of their actions on the site will appear in your feed (https://itch.io/my-feed). Such actions include publishing a new game, updating existing games, rating games, adding games in collections, posting a devlog entry.
I find the feature very useful overall to follow the activity of the people I'm interested! Many thanks to the itch.io devs for your hard work. <3
In addition to the feed itself, a notification appears over the feed link in the top menu, to let know how many new items in the feed you have to view.
In the above image, the top menu seems to indicate there are 4 new items to view in my feed.
The notification problem
The problem is that, in my personal usage, I find these notifications far too distracting:
- Mostly because there are far too many of them.
I follow 64 people on the site, most being creators, some being players who rate the things they like, yet others being both.
Therefore, I tend to receive a lot of notifications in the top menu for a lot of “small” actions, like adding a game to a collection.
I don't mind seeing what people add to collections per se. However, I get notifications for these actions so often (pretty much on a daily basis) that it's hard to know when an important action (a game release) did take place.
It also kind of feeds a semi-addictive behaviour where I keep checking the feed for important updates too often, to make sure not to miss important actions.
Overall, receiving that many notifications greatly diminishes the readability and usefulness of the feed for me. - The number displayed in the notification bubble seems often inaccurate?
The above screenshot indicated 4 new items in the feed, but I found only 2 new items since I last checked it.
In a few occurrences, I think I saw a notification bubble on the menu only to find 0 new items since the last time I had checked the feed. I may be wrong on this one, I'm simply recalling from memory.
Problem #1 is by far the biggest annoyance for me.
In fact, I've had to unfollow someone who curated a lot of things on the site once, not because I didn't like what they did, but because the frequency of notifications was far too high.
(I also slightly refrain from adding too many games to public collections, for fear of spamming my followers with mundane actions.)
Potential solutions
I realise that most users may experience no inconvenience with the feed notification if they follow few people. And I imagine that you've already considered much of this aspect when designing the feature. But here are a few possible solutions I'd envisioned!
- Displaying a notifications only for the most important actions (creating/updating a game)
This would improve the readability of the feed.
However, it would inconvenience users who like to be notified for all the actions of the users they follow (presumably because they don't follow many people in the first place: being notified every time for <10 followings may be more important and not inconvenient at all). - Allowing users to specify which action types they would like to be notified about
Perhaps the ideal solution (but I imagine it might be costly to implement).
But in my personal usage, I don't use much the different filters available on the feed page itself: I do not mind browsing the “everything” feed for a few minutes. On the other hand, I'd prefer to be notified only for the actions I find important. - Tricking the user: making notification bubble look less important to the user? Maybe?
A weird solution, but I realise that what bothers me so much about these notifications is that the bubble seems very urgent and important? It basically looks like a notification I would get for receiving a private message, or something equally important, which makes me constantly check the feed in hope of finding something important, only to find little.
Perhaps indicating a simple count between parentheses (or an asterisk) would better signify the presence of new actions, which may or may not be important.
Again, I imagine some of these ideas were already considered, and perhaps rejected for a reason at the time. But I'd love what other users think and if I'm the only who find the feed slight unnerving because of this notification problem!
I also realise that some of the solutions might be too complex for what ultimately remains a very small Quality-of-life change.
No worries about it, basically, I imagine the site may have other priorities! This can wait, but I'd love to hear of other users' experiences in the meantime.
See you around, and thanks for reading!