UX

We see an increasing number of websites using notifications irresponsibly. The moment you visit the site, you get prompted by the browser to sign up for notifications. Not only is it annoying to be asked immediately, but it is unlikely to be effective.

We wanted to set a good example for responsible use of push notifications. So we don’t ask for permission to send push notifications until the user selects the button asking to turn notifications on. And we only provide the option to subscribe at the bottom of articles.

Once someone selects that button, then we trigger the browser alert asking for permission to send notifications. If the person signs up, we send a quick notification thanking them and update the button to indicate how they can turn off notifications.

For more on using web notifications responsibly, we recommend Best Practices for Push Notifications Permissions UX by Owen Campbell-Moore.

This is really cool. This library seems to use the pointer’s trajectory to predict what you’re heading towards, and highlights the appropriate cube. I suspect this only works with pointers that can be detected as moving, like mice and styluses that have that capability, but probably does nothing useful with touch in most cases. Either way, give it a shot, it’s eerie. The most obvious use case for this is to pre-load a link if the user starts to head for it, but of course that has the side effect of possibly wasting the user’s data if they’re on a capped connection.