Message App and the 3 buttons - why are they needed ?

I have just closed the defect I logged about the 3 buttons in the message app being too close together so it was hard to select them.

However I would like to challenge why these buttons are needed at all. They seem a but unintuitive to me.

<- takes you back - but I'm quite happy to press what to me is the back button.
Tick - no idea what it does in practice
X - no idea what it does in practice.

The act of displaying a message is enough to acknowledge it. Is anything else really neeed ?

Personally I'd rather have a larger initial display space that was scrollable. (I know we have the option to display large / scroll which is great).

Maybe we could have an option to disable these buttons ?

What does everyone else think ? Do you find these buttons a bit confusing ?

100% agree.

In my opinion the messages* app would be better with gestures:

• remove all buttons: more space for content/bigger font
  
• replace the "back" button with a swipe right ("mark as unread", keep in message list)
  
• replace the "tick" button with a swipe left ("mark as read", remove from message list)
  
  

In my free time I could try to write some code. I promise nothing but I'd like to contribute :-D

*By the way, why is the app called "Messages"? Wouldn't "Notifications" be a better name? The app does nothing but show notifications ...

Tick - opens the notification
X - dismisses the notification

Personally I have no use for the tick, but use the X quite often.

Edit: If you're going to add in gestures, please make it an option. It's very much a personal preference.

Tick - opens the notification - on the phone
X - dismisses the notification - on the phone

I personally dont feel the need for these. Most of the time my phone will be locked anyway so dont really care what the notifications do on the phone.

Swipe left , swipe right make sense, configurable make make perfect sense.

I'd prefer to always manually delete the message or all messages.
I'm quite happy doing house keeping later on.
I dont really want to make a decision there and then if I want to keep or delete it.

My use case is, notice I have a message, if its a 1 liner read it and take it in. If its from Joe and its a long message and I dont want to read it all now then, automatically mark it as read as I have seen it, but I can go back to it later on when time allows.

The app does nothing but show notifications ...

It can show TEXTs, WhatsApp messages, Facebook Messenger messages. It depends if you have set your phone up to pass on these to GadgetBridge.

It depends if you have set your phone up to pass on these to GadgetBridge.

Precisely! I can receive a notification from a Calendar app/RSS reader/a game etc. "Notifications" is a more generic name but it's only my opinion :-)

To me its all about the messages. Notifications on a phone can be a bit spammy so I tend not to configure many of them to go through GadgetBridge - but I do want to see that SMS from my wife etc.

There's a post about this from just over a week ago http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/372566 and I believe there's already an open issue on GitHub too

What the buttons do is detailed in the README.

My concern with the swipe is it's pretty non-intuitive if there's no clue as to what to do - it's not like anyone actually reads the readme file so all the info about what to do really needs to be on the screen. I guess we could have some text and arrows right at the bottom of the screen though...

Even if I did read the README, I'm sure I'd constantly forget the difference between left/right swipes. But for notifications I could do without the "open" option: it seems kind of pointless, because you could just open it on your phone.

I do want to choose between dismissing a notification right away (also from my phone), or keeping it around.

I was thinking something like this:

• Notifications:
  
  • swiping dismisses the notification
    
  • middle button goes back without dismissing
    
  • Bangle.js 1: BTN1 dismisses the notification, BTN3 opens the menu
    
  • Bangle.js 2: 2 touch buttons: "Back" and "Tick"(=dismiss), but add a setting to hide these
    
• Calls get special handling:
  
  • Middle button goes back
    
  • Bangle.js 1: BTN1 accepts, BTN3 rejects
    
  • 2 touch buttons: "X"(reject) and "Tick"(=accept) , always visible. (Also for Bangle.js 1: we just accept left/right touch)
    
    

Maybe we should look into making all notifications scrollable right away? I mean making the whole screen scrollable: for a large text you would have to scroll down to see the buttons. (That would need some thinking about Bangle.js 1 buttons though)

How about this for notification messages:
Add new notifications to the bottom of a scrollable screen that gets displayed whenever a new message comes in. Preferably, this would take up all of the screen to enable a readable font.
Old messages are eventually deleted when they reach the top.
Tapping on a message could open a menu for saving/deleting.

I'm closing this thread as I have started another thread at
http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/373307/#comment16410736

about the UI design of the messages app.
Best not to have too many threads on the go about the same thing.

The 3 buttons are documented in the README file at:
https://github.com/espruino/BangleApps/blob/master/apps/messages/README.md