Notifications in the title bar
One tiny 'stickiness' feature which I really like on a lot of other websites is the little 'activity counter' added to the title bar, indicating that there's some new activity for you to read. Most sites with user-generated content do this in some form or another; FB, twitter, slack, trello, quora, discourse, etc etc.
Take a look at this:
Wow so massively tempting. I've found myself spending way more time on sites I'd otherwise not give a thought to, like LinkedIn or Quora, simply because I had a browser tab open and happened to see some new stuff pop up.
One thing I dont want is to overwhelm folks with a big number here (twitter is particularly bad at this). Take a look at this:
Oh geez, I never want to click on that ever.
My proposal here would be to sync the notifications count to the browser tab, meaning if you had 2 unread notifications, your title would be
(2) Recent | Loomio
This is a trivial implementation, and I think it might have a relatively large effect on the time people spend reading content on Loomio.
Am I alone in this? Is it something people would find useful? Are there other uses for the title bar you can think of?
Hm, could do; I do like the idea of new comments on the discussions page, new threads on the group page, and unread threads on the inbox. Might be a little confusing to the user why there's so many different values, or why that value is changing around so much though?
Why the aversion to notifications count on the thread page?
I'm not sure about it. Is the notifications count the right number to display?
Would we display it on all pages?
I wonder about keeping discussion thread pages without a notifications count.
Maybe putting unread count on page titles where there is unread threads, like inbox and group pages.