Adding a sort option to the notifications icon

[Michael Sharp]

Is it possible to change the order of notifications so that older items appear first?  Appreciate this goes against the grain for all other websites but in a service driven environment, I would prefer to service older notifications first (order of queue).

Regards,

Mike.

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @Michael Sharp,

We have in our backlog a story to create an additional full view for notifications and I believe we can also allow sorting options. 
The current popup is very small and has limited space. Also, if you have many notifications you will never see these because they will always be at the end.

We still have no time frame for this change.

Hope this is what you needed.

Regards,

Daniel.

[Michael Sharp]

1 minute ago, Daniel Dekel said:

Hi @Michael Sharp,

We have in our backlog a story to create an additional full view for notifications and I believe we can also allow sorting options. 
The current popup is very small and has limited space. Also, if you have many notifications you will never see these because they will always be at the end.

We still have no time frame for this change.

Hope this is what you needed.

Regards,

Daniel.

Thanks @Daniel Dekel that is exactly my issue!  Will try and whittle down (and keep down) my 130+ notifications in the meantime.....!

Regards,

Mike.

[Daniel Dekel]

@Michael Sharp, yes, that's quite a lot of notifications... Hope is because of holidays and not too much work ;-)

The full view will probably help on organizing the notifications including the dismissed ones.

Regards,

Daniel.

[Michael Sharp]

Unfortunately @Daniel Dekel I find it hard to recover from holidays!! :-)

[Michael Sharp]

@Daniel Dekel any progress on this please?

[Daniel Dekel]

Hi @Michael Sharp,

Sorry but nothing yet. Is is not in our scope yet, so it can take some time to be implemented.

Daniel.

[Adrian Simpkins]

I am going to follow this as well, as this sounds excellent idea - should help the Users here organise better, and hopefully stop some of the 'rumbling' going on  

[Michael Sharp]

@Daniel Dekel any traction on this one please?  As a minimum we would like to forcibly reverse the order for notifications as I think older prompts should be dealt with in advance of newer ones in a service management arena?  Our engineers have a habit of working with the most "live" notifications first which isn't correct in my view.

Regards,

Mike.

[Gerry]

@Michael Sharp @Adrian Simpkins

There has been some internal discussions around this request and for now at least, this is not looking like something we would change.  The Notification List is designed under the hood for its functionality a reliance on the fact that data is sorted in chronologically descending order. To change this would be to change the nature of its behaviour which could have quite aa knock-on effect.  For example, notifications on timelines are detected on chronology, and not an "unread-flag" per post, this is because unlike email there is no such thing as opening a post to read it/mark it a read. 

Philosophically, what you are describing is using notifications list as a "work list" and really thats not what its for.  Surely this is what the request list should be used for?

Gerry

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi Gerry, the issue was the Users were not looking down the list of notifications and if they have a large number of notifications they were focusing on what they could see in the Notifications window, rather than expanding the list and working the older items. We are not using it as a substitute for the Request list as such, so I will just keep plugging away with education on how to use the Notifications correctly,

Many Thanks as always  

[Michael Sharp]

Thansk for this @Gerry and I do appreciate where you're pitching from.  There will definitely be a challenge for all service managers however for staff being behind with updates processing the newest first (so potentially the oldest will always fall to the back).  It's not necessarily a work list but appreciate the feedback.

Regards,

Mike.

[Gerry]

@Adrian Simpkins @Michael Sharp

Thanks for your feedback also, and the suggestion.  I think the problem is, what you are asking for leads to this...

Quote

We have in our backlog a story to create an additional full view for notifications and I believe we can also allow sorting options.

And I am sure you will see that if we made such a list, weather intended or not, people would then use it as a work list, that would shortly be followed by "oh can can we just have this one extra field"... and before you know it, we would be re-creating a request list of sorts.  This is what I am nervous about, it would dilute the concentrate of functionality and create yet more stuff that users would need to understand.

I think it would be far better to solve this issue in another way, ideally using something that is more geared to that need.  If its a case that you need your techs to prioritise based on ageing, then it would seem sensible to set up the request list in that way.  Another option might be to limit the history count in the notifications list precisely to stop them from using the list as a work list. 

I can't help thinking this question has come up because maybe there is a shortcoming in the way the request list works, or the way in which the system facilities bringing to the fore the important aging stuff, where age is playing a part.  I would encourage you to think about that and see what might already be possible - and/or drive changes to Service Manager request list to get a better-aligned working practices. 

I would say though, please do keep the questions/suggestions coming, but I will do my best to try and expand on our thinking so it doe snot just come over as us saying No..

Thanks

Gerry

 

 

[Adrian Simpkins]

Hi Gerry,

totally agree that it should not be reworked in a way that it could potentially usurp the Request list. I think it will just be a case of my interacting with my teams, and ensuring they are using the Request List views correctly to prioritise their workloads. Especially to ensure they pick out historic items rather than just picking from the top of any displayed list

Many thanks as always 

[Martin.bowman]

Hi, 

This would be a huge benefit to myself and our team. Surely this is a very simple development, have a up/down around that switches between chronologically descending order to ascending order. Pretty standard functionality IMO

Martin

[Gerry]

@Martin.bowman

I think it is a lot easier to say than to do in practice.  The notification list is a chronologically, descending-ordered list that has infinite scroll capability.  In principle, ordering this in ascending order is easy, but thats not the problem. The problem is when you are scrolled to a certain position and the list is ordered in this way, what happens to new incoming notifications, where do we display them, how do we explain to users, no its not a bug that you are not seeing new notifications, its because you have re-ordered your notifications.  Then, I imagine, the next ask would be "oh, but for urgent notifications, can these be always shown at the top", and so it would go on.  

I think if you look at the notification features in other systems, or look at desktop notifications on Windows, mac, your phone or any of these types of systems, none of these provide a way of you looking at your notifications in oldest-first list form - there is a good reason for that. 

I think there is a need here, as its being asked for here, I think a conversation around what problem we are trying to solve, and less focus on the prescription "just tweaking whats mostly there", then we could probably find a way of solving the problem, for me it sounds like this is a "request list" thing, or at least a view in that area of the application would be a more logical starting point

Gerry 
 

[Michael Sharp]

37 minutes ago, Gerry said:

@Martin.bowman

I think it is a lot easier to say than to do in practice.  The notification list is a chronologically, descending-ordered list that has infinite scroll capability.  In principle, ordering this in ascending order is easy, but thats not the problem. The problem is when you are scrolled to a certain position and the list is ordered in this way, what happens to new incoming notifications, where do we display them, how do we explain to users, no its not a bug that you are not seeing new notifications, its because you have re-ordered your notifications.  Then, I imagine, the next ask would be "oh, but for urgent notifications, can these be always shown at the top", and so it would go on.  

I think if you look at the notification features in other systems, or look at desktop notifications on Windows, mac, your phone or any of these types of systems, none of these provide a way of you looking at your notifications in oldest-first list form - there is a good reason for that. 

I think there is a need here, as its being asked for here, I think a conversation around what problem we are trying to solve, and less focus on the prescription "just tweaking whats mostly there", then we could probably find a way of solving the problem, for me it sounds like this is a "request list" thing, or at least a view in that area of the application would be a more logical starting point

Gerry 
 

I think to be fair, comparing being tagged in a cat video or being told Netflix has taken a monthly direct debit can't really be compared with service driven notifications.  I think it is the duty of service managers to ensure notifications are delivered in manageable and useful to their staff to prevent overload (which I think is the solution you're trying to get to above) but the problem is if notifications come in quick succession or someone is returning from a period of leave, working in a different order (without having to click "More" each time) would be a more logical approach to clearing a backlog.  Same principal as tickets where you would expect them being dealt with in "resolve by" order rather than what came in that day.

Regards,

Mike.

[Gerry]

@Michael Sharp

Quote

I think it is the duty of service managers to ensure notifications are delivered in manageable and useful to their staff to prevent overload

I agree 100% with you on this point, and thats why I say its something very specific to the needs of "service managers", but in Hornbill, the notification system is a *generic* notification system, its not just for service managers, we have people using Hornbill for other things that do not include service management at all.  Hornbill is a platform, which amongst other things provides a unified, browser, desktop and mobile notification system.  Service Manager (our service manager application/solution) is an application that runs on the Hornbill Platform, so to make the notifications work like a prioritised workload list of people working requests is not in keeping with the design intent and is not appropriate to do.  However, there is no reason not to look at adding a different view somewhere inside Service Manager that could address the needs of "service managers to ensure notifications are delivered in manageable and useful to their staff to prevent overload", and this would mean doing something different to twisting the notifications  into some form of pseudo shortcut work management list. 

If we looked at addressing this problem via the request list (or that type of view), what would that look like...? that would be worth a discussion if this indeed a problem that Service Manager does not currently address well. 

Gerry 


 

[Gareth Noon]

Would it be possible to add a sort by (newest or oldest) to the notifications?

Feedback from some users is that when they have a lot of notifications they like to deal with the oldest first but to do this, you have to keep scrolling down.

[Steve Giller]

@Gareth Noon I've merged your topic with this existing one - please review the comments above and then add your thoughts here.

[Gareth Noon]

Has there been any movement on adding sorting options to notifications within Service Manager? Allowing users to sort oldest to newest or visa versa in their unread notificaitons?

[Gerry]

@Gareth Noon

I think the above thread is basically saying we are not going to be able to add a sort option, so no, no movement on this ask I am afraid 

Gerry

[Xavier]

Hi Gerry & co. 

This might be a misunderstanding of what the intent and purpose of the "Notification bell" is for. 
Would you be able to elaborate on what your expected use-case is for it? 

When I handle a ticket, either Service Request or Incident, I put it on hold for a while before I Resolve, to give a customer the chance to provide a further update. 
If said ticket is updated by the customer, or comes off hold - a notification is generated.
I go through these notifications based on oldest first to ensure that I'm handling older content before going to new content. Is this not the correct or expected method to handle support queues to ensure that the oldest doesn't age too far? 
By only focusing the newer notifications, this prioritises customers that spam for updates and chase relentlessly - forcing down older tickets in the queue to be missed for longer periods of time. UNLESS the staff member clicks the "view more" a few times and works up from the bottom of the list. 

The request list has lots of arrows for each column for sorting. That's all I feel people want here too. 

 

Thanks!  

Xavier.

[Peter Clough]

Would a partial solution to this (which may need to be spun off into its own request) be to add a default sort when building views? So a view called "Backlog", for example, could be set to always sort by Last Updated and put the oldest dates to the top automatically? It doesn't resolve the specific ask of sorting notifications, but if a majority of those notifications are for jobs already in their view, then it may serve to at least partially fulfil the same purpose.