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Description
Ain't sure how I used 15 minutes of my time on making this... Eh, might as well xP

It seems that there has been ruffled feathers in regards of DeviantArt shuffling the notification system around and smacking apparently convoluted features that gets things a bit too confusing, a notion that I agree pretty much completely. Well, perhaps with a bit less frustration due to adapting to things a bit too fast for my own good but that's a different can of worms . _.

That said, as I have always gone with philosophy of "if you wanna dish out criticism, be ready to offer solutions" when addressing an situation as well as having seen results from it I think could at least try to give my two cents to finding a solution to the notification-system. After all, politely requesting features with points for how they'd work out has gotten us green theme and banner resolution-size fixed in the past soooo...

Anyways, time to explain what things I'm depicting in the image above how I'd adjust notifications:

1). Scrapping the live-notification side-bar; not pulling much surprises here about this thing, as for the past 4 months it seems to have a redundant purpose of enabling people see activity while browsing anywhere on DA (a thing I only just realized by hovering over the bell-icon as I wrote this line). Thing is, I have a strong feeling that people are more used to and prone to simply clicking on their notifications to interact with messages about activity on a dedicated page, especially when the side-bar forces users to abandon what they're doing and hop to the Deviation-page which they are able to do already from notification-page.

I think it there is not much to add here as there seems to not really be much utility for this "live-tab" that hasn't even gone official for past 4 months of its existence. I'd advice from removing the feature and just focus on the native notification pages instead, mkay?

2). Swapping notification-icon placement; speaking of the existing notification system, I have to agree that the weird decision of shifting the placement of notification to the left side is an awkward placement to say the least. I guess that was done to sync with the "Watch"-tab located there, while the miscellaneous "..."-icon (holding access to Groups, Print Shop, Forum, Pop-Up Shop and DA-Project) is for some reason on the right-side designated to user-related things... Not really most synergizing layout if you ask me.

Simply put, I'd say swapping the positions between bell-icon and "..."-icon would be best: make the top left dedicated for browsing DA with search-bar and miscellaneous features, while let the top-right be user-dedicated corner for checking activity and posting stuff. Would be more logical as seen in the pre-Eclipse days.

3). "Watch"-tab migration; moving over to the Watch-tab (meant for displaying uploads, posts, journals, etc. from +WATCHed users), I have to be honest... having these notifications being separated from comments/favorites/etc. has always been most iffy about the current system: something about separating some activities for no clear reason (apart from filtering to being +WATCH-specific maybe?..). I think that we could take a page from the pre-Eclipse version and simply merge this into the notifications itself as having access to all notifications on single page will always be most user-friendly and efficient, as far as I'm concerned.

Nothing much to add here once more, so I guess we can move onto the actual notification-page and notifications themselves.

4). Updating the Notification-page; To conclude on this, I bet it would be good to give some tweaking to the actual page for the notifications to accommodate for the changes. As seen in the image, I have taken a more simple approach from the past with a header containing tabs for each separate type of notifications (deviations from +WATChed fellas, comments, polls, you get the idea) including the "All"-tab for having access to every notification at once. Coupled with a simple red dot markers to indicate about new notifications (including the bell-icon on top right) and this might just have a solid grounds for being pretty polished system with a simple, concise and dedicated purpose.

=========================

Alrite, I guess wasting a hour on typing the description shall be enough: time to quickly send actual feedback-message to DA and get on with more typical drawing stuff :v

Description
Ain't sure how I used 15 minutes of my time on making this... Eh, might as well xP

It seems that there has been ruffled feathers in regards of DeviantArt shuffling the notification system around and smacking apparently convoluted features that gets things a bit too confusing, a notion that I agree pretty much completely. Well, perhaps with a bit less frustration due to adapting to things a bit too fast for my own good but that's a different can of worms . _.

That said, as I have always gone with philosophy of "if you wanna dish out criticism, be ready to offer solutions" when addressing an situation as well as having seen results from it I think could at least try to give my two cents to finding a solution to the notification-system. After all, politely requesting features with points for how they'd work out has gotten us green theme and banner resolution-size fixed in the past soooo...

Anyways, time to explain what things I'm depicting in the image above how I'd adjust notifications:

1). Scrapping the live-notification side-bar; not pulling much surprises here about this thing, as for the past 4 months it seems to have a redundant purpose of enabling people see activity while browsing anywhere on DA (a thing I only just realized by hovering over the bell-icon as I wrote this line). Thing is, I have a strong feeling that people are more used to and prone to simply clicking on their notifications to interact with messages about activity on a dedicated page, especially when the side-bar forces users to abandon what they're doing and hop to the Deviation-page which they are able to do already from notification-page.

I think it there is not much to add here as there seems to not really be much utility for this "live-tab" that hasn't even gone official for past 4 months of its existence. I'd advice from removing the feature and just focus on the native notification pages instead, mkay?

2). Swapping notification-icon placement; speaking of the existing notification system, I have to agree that the weird decision of shifting the placement of notification to the left side is an awkward placement to say the least. I guess that was done to sync with the "Watch"-tab located there, while the miscellaneous "..."-icon (holding access to Groups, Print Shop, Forum, Pop-Up Shop and DA-Project) is for some reason on the right-side designated to user-related things... Not really most synergizing layout if you ask me.

Simply put, I'd say swapping the positions between bell-icon and "..."-icon would be best: make the top left dedicated for browsing DA with search-bar and miscellaneous features, while let the top-right be user-dedicated corner for checking activity and posting stuff. Would be more logical as seen in the pre-Eclipse days.

3). "Watch"-tab migration; moving over to the Watch-tab (meant for displaying uploads, posts, journals, etc. from +WATCHed users), I have to be honest... having these notifications being separated from comments/favorites/etc. has always been most iffy about the current system: something about separating some activities for no clear reason (apart from filtering to being +WATCH-specific maybe?..). I think that we could take a page from the pre-Eclipse version and simply merge this into the notifications itself as having access to all notifications on single page will always be most user-friendly and efficient, as far as I'm concerned.

Nothing much to add here once more, so I guess we can move onto the actual notification-page and notifications themselves.

4). Updating the Notification-page; To conclude on this, I bet it would be good to give some tweaking to the actual page for the notifications to accommodate for the changes. As seen in the image, I have taken a more simple approach from the past with a header containing tabs for each separate type of notifications (deviations from +WATChed fellas, comments, polls, you get the idea) including the "All"-tab for having access to every notification at once. Coupled with a simple red dot markers to indicate about new notifications (including the bell-icon on top right) and this might just have a solid grounds for being pretty polished system with a simple, concise and dedicated purpose.

=========================

Alrite, I guess wasting a hour on typing the description shall be enough: time to quickly send actual feedback-message to DA and get on with more typical drawing stuff :v