When we released Yoono 7, we took a new approach to how you are notified of a new update, IM, or message from your friends. Even the pop-up notifications have been revamped both technically and visually to allow for better performance, readability and usability over the notification window in version 6.2. Since releasing Yoono 7, there are a few users that don’t like the update numbers and how they continually go up and up, finally reaching 999+ unread updates. I’m going to write this blog post about the changes we made in Yoono 7 but I’ll be showing you screenshots and writing this using Yoono 7.1 (currently in public beta) as we’ve improved the UI a bit to make managing the update count and display a bit easier.
Yoono 7.1 makes it easy to mark updates as read, clear them from view and increase the size of text for better readability. We’ve also introduced multi-column view so you can view updates from many networks across multiple columns without switching tabs in Yoono for various networks.
If you have a question or piece of feedback, please connect with us at http://support.yoono.com so we can use your valuable feedback to improve our product. Without further ado, let’s get started!
Let’s start by discussing the UI of Yoono 7.1 and how it displays unread updates.
As you can see from the image above, each network has an icon. Twitter accounts (I have 5 of them) are signified with a small Twitter icon in the bottom left hand corner. Facebook, Flickr, AIM and other networks are pretty easy to see because their icons are recognizable.
Red Numbers: Signify unread updates. These can be updates from friends, photo uploads, new IM conversations, Twitter replies, DMs and Facebook messages. All has the number 567 and that’s calculated based on the unread updates from all networks combined.
Blue Numbers: Signify search results. Blue is tied to Twitter search results. In Yoono, you can search Twitter and save those search results so Yoono will search and show you a number of new updates. For example, I have the Twitter account for Yoono set to search “yoono” on Twitter and there are 9 new mentions of our application since the last time I refreshed.
We don’t count higher than 999 updates given the limited space available in our sidebar’s interface. When any one of the networks reaches 999 unread updates, the number will go no higher. How do you “read” updates to reduce the count signified in the red boxed text? It’s pretty easy.
As you can see in the image below, unread updates are “yellow”
After 3 seconds of sitting on this current screen, those updates will fade from yellow to white and the unread count will drop since those have been read. Of course, having 900 of these will take a while and we don’t expect you to scroll all day to mark all of these as read. Yoono 7 and Yoono 7.1 are pretty similar in how you mark all as read or clear all updates from view but we’ve improved the UI a bit in the latest version.
In Yoono 7, simply right click on any of the tabs that show unread updates and click “mark all as read” The red numbers go away and the yellow updates all become white. Below, is how you do it in Yoono 7.1
All Tab:
As you can see, I can mark all as read or remove all from this list. Marking all as read clears the yellow highlight on all updates in all tabs and removes the red numbers. On a related note, you’ll see that you can now filter the view to show you only unread (select “All unread updates”) so you can skip things you’ve already read and focus on new items.
If you simply want to mark all as read on a single network, that’s possible as well. Take Facebook for example. The drop down arrow shows up on the “Updates” tab, messages tab and notifications tab depending on which one is selected. We make it easy to fine tune what you mark as read.
Note that when you select “mark all as read” for the updates stream it doesn’t always mark all network features as read – we’ve done this on purpose to make sure you see important items like Twitter Direct Messages. After clicking mark all as read on all networks, see before and after screen shots:
Before:
After:
Notice that there are still a few unread notifications. By marking all as read, Twitter replies & DMs are not marked. We consider these important enough to not be marked as read because these are updates directed at you specifically and not updates from your friends that are going to everyone generally. The same rule applies if you have any Facebook messages that are unread. Also notice that the search result that I have saved under the Yoono Twitter account is still showing 9 new updates. We also feel saved search results should be prioritized to show as “unread” even after you click mark all as read.
Overall, we hope this approach meets the needs of our users and it’s been implemented this way as the result of direct user feedback.
You can also “remove all from this list” which will clear all of the updates from the list. It’s pretty self explanatory.
Before:
After:
As you can see, all of the updates (aside from replies and search results) have been removed from view and in the all tab, it shows “You have new new updates!” This is a great way to start clean with a simple view free of any updates. If you want to remove a single update or notification, you can now hover over an update and a trash can icon appears in the lower right. (shown below).
Clicking the trash can removes that update. Remember, the update will still be on Twitter.com or whichever service it came from, you’re just telling Yoono to hide it from view.
Finally, on a semi-related note, Yoono has a new feature that enables you to tweak the size of text in Yoono so that you can make the updates stream font size best suit your individual needs. We’ve had a lot of feedback on this point and are happy to finally be able to provide this functionality to our users!
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These are a few of the ways to help you manage notifications and unread messages better in Yoono. We’ve made great strides in the past few months that makes it easier to find updates, manage updates and stay up to date with your social circle without the headache or being overwhelmed by information overload. As always, we welcome feedback and comments!
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