Require user gesture for “Show notifications” permission dialog

37 views
Skip to first unread message

Šime Vidas

unread,
Sep 8, 2016, 3:26:47 PM9/8/16
to intervention-dev
Would this make sense? Users don’t like being shown this dialog immediately after arriving on a web page, without any context (see this discussion).

Ojan Vafai

unread,
Sep 8, 2016, 4:55:12 PM9/8/16
to Šime Vidas, intervention-dev, domi...@google.com
Doing *something* here definitely makes sense. It's really hard to find something sufficiently web compatible.

+Dominick Ng is evaluating options for permissions in general.

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 12:26 PM Šime Vidas <sime....@gmail.com> wrote:
Would this make sense? Users don’t like being shown this dialog immediately after arriving on a web page, without any context (see this discussion).

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "intervention-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to intervention-d...@chromium.org.
To post to this group, send email to interven...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/intervention-dev/40913534-5d79-4a42-9c18-274401b58f5d%40chromium.org.

Dominick Ng

unread,
Sep 8, 2016, 8:26:23 PM9/8/16
to Ojan Vafai, Šime Vidas, intervention-dev
The permissions team agrees that onload permission requests are incredibly irritating and shouldn't be done. We also strongly feel that such requests *should* be made in context.

We've been looking into a number of things to try and discourage onload requests. Unfortunately, detecting if a permission request is made on page load (or very soon after page load) is pretty tricky to do accurately. Like Ojan said, any change we make could also break interop (Chrome won't let you call geolocation/notifications/etc. when others browsers will).

We've reached out to various sites which use onload prompts to try and encourage them to not do that. A lot of these sites have basically ignored us, e.g. Facebook, which hits you with a door-slam black background page with a permission request after you login (see attached). They've basically said, "this works best for us wrt CTR" when we tried to tell them not to do this. This is an outlier case, but it's representative of the attitude we've often encountered.

There are also sites which genuinely won't work properly without a permission grant as early as possible (weather sites, map sites, etc.). In these cases, we don't necessarily want want to prevent a prompt, because it will only confuse typical users who might not understand why the site isn't working properly.

We have early metrics suggesting that permission requests are 3-4x more likely to be granted by users if they are accompanied by a user gesture - i.e. that they're (probably) triggered by the user explicitly clicking on something on the page and directly showing interest in a feature which requires permission. We're probably going to try an experiment where requests for permission without a gesture are simply ignored (and maybe even work to get that codified in the spec).

So yes, in summary, we know onload prompts are annoying. We're working on solutions to try and address the situation, but it's a challenging problem for a bunch of reasons.

On 9 September 2016 at 06:55, Ojan Vafai <oj...@chromium.org> wrote:
Doing *something* here definitely makes sense. It's really hard to find something sufficiently web compatible.

+Dominick Ng is evaluating options for permissions in general.

On Thu, Sep 8, 2016 at 12:26 PM Šime Vidas <sime....@gmail.com> wrote:
Would this make sense? Users don’t like being shown this dialog immediately after arriving on a web page, without any context (see this discussion).

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "intervention-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to intervention-dev+unsubscribe@chromium.org.



--

 -Dom.
facebook-notifications-after-login.png

Dru Knox

unread,
Sep 9, 2016, 1:21:32 PM9/9/16
to Dominick Ng, Ojan Vafai, Šime Vidas, intervention-dev
What if we just added a delay to permission requests that don't have a user gesture? My guess is that the 3-4x increase in CTR with a user gesture is due to what Dominick said - the user clicked on something that brought up a permission dialog in context. But *maybe* it's just because they've had some time to start engaging with the site? Another benefit is that this wouldn't break interrop (I don't think).

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to intervention-d...@chromium.org.



--

 -Dom.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "intervention-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to intervention-d...@chromium.org.

To post to this group, send email to interven...@chromium.org.

Ojan Vafai

unread,
Sep 9, 2016, 7:44:34 PM9/9/16
to Dru Knox, Dominick Ng, Šime Vidas, intervention-dev
Hard for me to see how that would work. How long would the delay be? If it's on the order of 5-10 seconds, I'm skeptical it buys much.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages