Windows 7 to decrease the number of annoying notifications with Action Center
Today, the e7 blog announced that they are working on something called the Action Center designed for the purpose of reducing those annoying pop-up notifications (such as the ones telling you your firewall is off) on your screen. The Action Center will become a central location for dealing with notifications by sorting the notifications into a queue. These notifications would be ones that were “questionably effective” but could not be removed. You can then decide how to diagnose or address the problems in the queue through the Action Center. To better understand the logic behind Action Center, these were the steps taken in the design process:
- Putting messages into one of two categories – normal or important. Normal messages simply appear in the Action Center control panel. Important messages send a notification balloon as well as appearing in the Action Center.
- Setting a high bar for important messages. A message is only deemed important if the security of the system or the integrity of your data is at risk.
- Reducing the frequency of notifications so that you’re not seeing them pop-up “all the time”
- Looking at all the messages and asking the hard questions –“is this something you really need to know about?”
There are two major components to the design of the User Experience in the Action Center. The first is the “lighthouse” icon in build 6801. The lighthouse icon replaces five notification area icons from Vista and provides easy access to past or current notifications.
The big emphasis here is for Windows to be able to provide you solutions with an action for each notification. Each notification will be associated with a particular useful action, and all those that cannot be associated with an action will be removed. For example, if your antivirus is out of date, you will be alerted with a notification box along with an option to update your antivirus software directly. And you will no longer be told that your system is secure, even though you probably already know.
The second would be the control panel (shown in the image above), which shows you the message queue with more detailed solutions. “Top-level links” are provided in the Troubleshooting and Recovery options for issues the notifications do not address.
I noticed the Windows Solution Center is a lot like the Action Center they’re talking about here. My guess is that the Solution Center is the unfinished product of the Action Center. It’s good to know that Microsoft is paying to close details like this to make the overall Windows experience better. I’m hoping that they will address the privacy issue with sensors in their next post.
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Tags: action center, windows 7, windows 7 action center, windows 7 notifications
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2 Responses to “Windows 7 to decrease the number of annoying notifications with Action Center”
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I am very glad that Microsoft is implementing this feature in Windows 7, most of the people don’t like notifications, no matter how important they are. The pop-up in Windows is really intrusive and are not user-friendly at all. Now with these features in Windows 7, they are making it more user-friendly so that it does not interfere with users experience. Great work Microsoft.
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