Live-share: Reduce UI noise when in a collaboration session (e.g. notifications)

[isidorn]

Platform independent

1. VSCode, install liveshare
2. Start a collaborations session
3. Successfully end a collaboraiton session

In this process I got around 4 Notifications.

The first one was about welcome to live share, second one was about the invitation link being copied to clipboard, the third one was about How was my collboration session.

VSCode tries to be a minimalistic code editor and a bunch of notifications ruin it's look and feel imho.
I would really try hard to cut down on the number of notifications.

Also this is not skype, please do not ask me how was my collaboration session, vscode users got used to going to github / twitter and complaining / praising the product there is no need to add dialogs like this.

I understand there are the never show again, but still this ruins it for me when I have to manually click 4 times to never show me notifications I do not care about.

[lostintangent]

@isidorn Hey! This is an area we definitely want feedback on, since we're trying to balance the desire to provide a guided experience for users and appropriately solicit feedback, without being too "spammy" 😄Talking through the various notifications a bit:

1. The "welcome" notification would only appear once, and in general, seems like a fairly common thing that extensions do after installation (especially if they require setup) (e.g. Settings Sync, Team Chat). That's not to say they _should_ do this, but we wanted to provide new users with next steps, without being too invasive (and this pattern _felt_ established). Ideally, we could display an information message that included action buttons, _but_ would also auto-dismiss after some period of time (like notifications with no action buttons do). That way, this toast could display, but wouldn't require manually clicking it away.

2. The "share success" notification is simply meant to indicate completion of the share operation, and appropriate next steps. Like #1 above, it would also be great if we could indicate that this toast should auto-dismiss, that way, it didn't require manually clicking it away. That said, we should probably also discuss how to reduce clutter for repeat users, since this toast may become less valuable over time.

3. The "how was your session?" notification is our attempt to understand how the product is working well in the wild. Much like Skype, we actually have a lot of variability in network reliability/etc. so it's useful for us to gather this information. We currently only show this dialog every five sessions, and it's only displayed on the host side (so you wouldn't see it every time you collaboration). That said, we should probably back off from showing it on the first session, that way, a user's first experience doesn't leave them with a bad taste (like you mentioned).

[isidorn]

Thanks for the explanations. I understand that each of those notifications has some reason to be there but the overall experience felt too clutered.

I also understand how you are balancing between a guided expereince and not, but a guided experience does not make sense after I have succesfully collaborated multiple number of times.

So some suggestions:

1. Remove "how was your session". People will complain on GitHub either way. I see you feel strongly about not removing it, so at least do what you suggested (do not show it for first N sessions, only show it every Nth session afterwards)
2. As you suggested consider to stop guiding users after N successful collborative sessions and make this customizable via setting with: always / never / smart. Smart being the default which stops showing after it has shown N times

[lostintangent]

@isidorn Both of your suggestions make total sense! We'll try to make these changes in our next release. Thanks again for this great feedback.

[tigoe]

To add to this, the notification toasts make VS Live Share really difficult to use through a screen reader. It's a really useful plugin when you want to share code with a classroom full of students, but when a couple of people in the room are using use screen readers, the connection process is hell for them, in particular because of the notification toasts, because the screen readers don't read them out, or let them navigate to the dismiss button. It would be really good to simplify the connection process, and either do away with the toasts or make them WCAG-compliant.

[misolori]

I'd also like to echo the amount of noise in notifications. It's gotten to the point that I need to disable the plugin until I'm ready to use it. For example, here's what I see every single time I do a session:

And the biggest offender is the update notifications. This comes across as very spammy:

[lostintangent]

I really appreciate the feedback here! I think there's a few tangible/reasonable things we can do here:

1. Provide a setting to users to disable notifications entirely. This would be off by default, but would allow folks to suppress the notifications that are otherwise valuable for gaining context (e.g. someone joined your session). In your example above, that would suppress all of the notifications. I think providing this option makes total sense, since we want users to stick around, even if that means losing the ability to notify them about things 😄

2. Suppress the "how was your session?" toast for the most part, and only display it to folks on some kind of sampled basis (assuming you haven't disabled notifications entirely already). This would get road of the third toast in your image above, and it would become a rare occurrence that you see it (much like the VS Code NPS survey toast).

The "update toast" is something we've only done a few times, and at most ~6 weeks a part. I've noticed other extensions do this as well (and VS Code itself?), so I didn't think it was too spammy. But I appreciate the feedback :) We're generally only using it to promote extremely high-pri feature items, that seem valuable enough to ensure users are aware of, without expecting them to stumble upon it naturally. That said, we're rapidly reaching the point where we won't need to do this anymore, so the "update toast" won't be a tool we'll use often at all (and they be suppressible per the aforementioned setting).

[misolori]

Thanks for the quick response!

I also think that VS Code needs to have a better way to handle these type of "notification updates" and to figure out the appropriate time/place for those to happen (if the user wants them).

[misolori]

Also, related thread about extension updates https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/21583

[lostintangent]

I'm updating the title of this issue to indicate that it's not specific to VS Code. The proposals we discussed above would apply equally as well to VS, and we'll ensure we reduce notification noise in both tools.

[lostintangent]

In our latest extension update, we've done the two things that I mentioned in my previous message:

1. Completely suppressed the "How was your session?" notification
2. Added a new setting called liveshare.showVerboseNotification, that allows you to suppress many other notifications (e.g. guest joined)

I _think_ this addresses the core concerns, but please let us know if we can do better. Thanks!

[tigoe]

I think it does too, but will keep an eye out for the difference in the future.

Either way, I love it when someone closes an issue by asking if it works like that. Thank you!