News is currently usually sent to the user via e-mail notifications. Some notifications are also visible via the top bar (glyphs with counter, f.e. email, conversations, background tasks). Important information is only partly directly visible, while other news do not get a place in the top bar.

Adding missing news glyphs to the top bar is not an option.
The Top Navigation contains a various types of elements. Further, the space is limited and the elements that need to find a place there is growing (see e.g. Background Task Service User Interface).

The Notification Center gathers messages that require attention in chronological order (grouped by service) and trigger a novelty counter. This can be notifications like someone who has just come online, sending a chat request, a new background task that has been prepared and is ready for download. The aim of this center is to make notification visible and quickly accessible. It contains a collection of short information with links that lead directly to the details of this message.

It is a centralized channel into which notifications are bundled into who wish to draw the user's attention to a message. 
Every service that can send a notification

• should add an entry in the Notification Center
• and should also have a permanent place (mainly in Main Bar), somewhere where old messages can still be viewed. Exceptions to this are the chat and the Background Tasks.
  • OnScreenChats will be displayed in the lower right corner of the screen as in ILIAS 5.4.
  • Background Tasks will only be displayed in the Notification Center.

The main advantage of notification center is, that less space is needed in the top bar. It gets more place for different sort/size of logos and brandings and for installation title, even in mobile version. Further there is more external consistency, since the channeling of such notifcation in one single notification stream pushed to the user is used in many other applications (e.g. message center in iOS, Android, macOS,...).

We have identified three different types of changeable information:

• Static (a message that remains until an interaction has taken place, like mail)
• Dynamic (system task that is being processed and can end in a user interaction, like background-task)
• Live view (a kind of widget or view of something that can change while viewed, like who-is-online)
• Toast (a short-lived message displayed on the screen without page loading, like "You have received 1 Contact Request"-Toast)

The Notification Center displays entries of type "static", "dynamic" and entries that are generated "due to existing toasts" (e.g. Badges, Contact Requests). The Notification Center Entries do not replace the toast. In addition to the short-lived toast, the information is displayed in a Notification Center Entry.

A purely chronological order is difficult because things that require a lot of attention (e.g. on-screen chat) could displace all other entries. Therefore, it is suggested to categorize notifications by services (e.g. iOS message center). This shows the last entry and bundles the other notifications of the same service.

As already worked out above, 5 categories will be diyplayed in the Notification Center in ILIAS 6.0:

1. Mails (NC)
2. Background Tasks (NC)
3. On-Screen-Chat (NC)
4. Contact Requests (Toast + E-Mail + NC)
5. Badges (Toast + E-Mail + NC)

For each category, only the last / most recent entry is displayed. The categories are sorted in a fixed order. They are not sorted in chronological order because the constant change of order is too restless and irritates users.

If a service has no Notification Center Entry, the entire area is not visible (i.e. no intertitles and no empty entries). If the Notification Center is completely empty (all entries are "closed"), there is a message "No notifications available".

Nice-to-have:

• If a service does not have more than 2 Notification Center Entries, the entries are displayed in detail (e.g. Mail: The sender and the first X characters of the message are displayed.) As soon as there are more than 2 Notification Center entries per service, a generic message appears (e.g. "You have X unread mails").

How does the Notification Center represent the difference between Novelty- and Status-Counters?

The Notification Center only uses the Novelty Counter. Services that previously used a status and novelty counter receive one entry per task.

• Example: Background Task
  1. Novelty Counter: Interactions are required (for example, when a task is ready and files are ready for download)
  2. Status Counter: Ongoing tasks, for example if a course is copied and this takes 2 minutes (does not exist at the moment)
• Presentation in the Notification Center:
  1. Task (finished): 2 Files are ready to download. Remains until it is closed (x) by user. (same behaviour as now)
  2. Task (ongoing, no user interaction need): Course XY is being copied. Entry is omitted automatically when task has been finished. (same behaviour as now)

For ILIAS 6 we prefer the implementation of a few actions. In the future it may be considered that more information or actions or interactions are possible via the action menu or a fold-out entry (e.g. accepting contact requests, answering a chat message,...).

Where is the Public Chat placed?

The Public Chat is placed in the Main Bar Communication >> Public Chat for the following reasons.

• There is already a separate screen for the public chat so that we can display Public Chat in the Content Area.
• The public chat currently has no notifications (ILIAS 5.4). Users need to open public chat to be notified of new messages.

Nice-to-have:

• The Public Chat can generate the entry "There are new messages in Public Chat." in the NC.

All: Since Top Bar itself is affected.

Note that this moves most of Meta Bar Glyphs to Main Bar:

• Mail => Main Bar: Communication
• Badges => MainBar: Achievements >> Badges
• Contact Requests => Main Bar: Contacts >> My Contacts
• Public Chatroom => Main Bar: Communication

Exceptions:

• Background Task => Notification Center
• OnScreenChat => lower right corner as in ILIAS 5.4

The Feature Request describes a first version of the Notification Center. The idea is to combine all the services that are currently displayed in the Top Bar into one Notification Center.
In upcoming ILIAS versions, the Notification Center will form the central interface for notifications from all ILIAS areas. It is conceivable that Notification Center entries may display additional information in the future or that users may respond directly to messages via the Notification Center.

It should be checked whether we can build a UI component "Notification" so that it can update the content (not HTML, but data) from the outside (via JavaScript). It must also be possible to create a new notification of pages with JavaScript.

The following UI elements must be updatable via JavaScript:

• Updating the counter
• Creation/updating of a UI-component "notification" based on "data" (to be defined later)
• Mounting a UI component "Notification" in the corresponding container (e.g. "Chat")
• Removing a UI component "Notificaton" from the corresponding container
• hide empty containers if necessary (e.g. "Chat" without notification)

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In the meeting of 7th of march 2019 (see: https://docu.ilias.de/goto_docu_xpdl_7223.html) we sketched out the following possible precedure to work around possible client-only available data of the chat:

• Glyph:
  • The KS-Glyph needs some very small scale JavaScript API that allows to update the counter on the client-side. This is not avaible yet, an according PR proposing this is necessary. The Glyph component must store it's initial counter value when being rendered by the server and delivered to the client. The API must allow different providers to set absolute numeric values for a specific provider key. Let's suppose the inital value ist 7. Five conversations of the OnScreen-Chat component are markes as 'hidden', so the OnScreen-Chat will use the client-side API and sets the value 5 for the provider key 'osc'. The Glyph counter value must be re-rendered as 12. If another conversation of the OnScreen-Chat is put to the background, the OnScreen-Chat will pass 6 as value for it's provider key, the value of the counter must be re-rendered as 13. If another client-side provider sets a value as well, e.g. 5, the total value will be rendered as 18.
• List:
  1. The user clicks on the notification glyph (bell)  
  2. The 'Notification Center' component has to request additional data from all providers supporting client-side notifications by a defined client-side JavaScript interface.
  3. This collection of data is used as request data for a HTTP request to the 'Notification Center' controller/GUI in ILIAS.
  4. The 'Notification Center' component calls all known providers supporting server-side notifications and asks for current entries to be shown. The requests data (the client-side notification data) is passed to the respective providers which support client-site notificatons where the data can be somehow processed/modified/converted. The data of all providers together is then used to build/render the UI component.
  5. A HTTP response with the rendered list will be send to the client.

If you are interest in funding this feature, please add your name and institution to this list.

• …

Approved at 6.12.2019 by Amstutz, Timon [amstutz] with kind support of the iLUB Team.