Heads-up notification swipe up handling

[Sebastiano Poggi]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently testing a small patch I've done on my AOSP fork to handle heads-up notifications upwards swiping differently from horizontal swiping. What currently happens when the user swipes a heads-up notification towards the upper edge of the screen is that the notification gets dismissed, as it happens when they swipe it horizontally.

This means there is no way of "postponing" a heads-up notification for users, because you can either immediately take action on the notification, or ignore it. There is a UX issue where heads-up notifications take a considerable amount of time to auto-hide, and at the same time cover the whole upper edge of the screen, preventing access to the app bar. The user cannot thus simply ignore heads-up notifications they don't want to immediately handle.

My changeset would make a distinction in the direction of the dismissal swiping in HeadsUpNotificationView and PhoneStatusBar so that upwards swipes on heads-up notifications are not dismissed but rather released and tucked back in the status bar, as if they timed out.

I think this would improve the UX of the notifications system in Lollipop, but I'm asking here on the general consensus before submitting a patch.

Thanks

PS: code for the patch can be found here in the meantime.

[Eugenio Marletti]

Makes sense, it's also consistent with the Android Wear UX.

[Chris Wren]

Agreed that it makes sense.  In fact, it was called for in the original design, but just didn't make it into the L release.

Thank you, Sabastiano for writing a fix. The code looks correct, unfortunately (fortunately?) the issue has already been fixed internally, so we won't be able to use this particular patch.

It's great that you are thinking about the user experience and working to make it better.  We look forward to seeing more patches in the future.

[Sebastiano Poggi]

Good to know it's already been taken care of!

I have at least another UX patch in the pipeline -- I have some working code for that but I need to test it properly first, then I'll write here again.

Thanks

Sebastiano