codidact
Inbox listings should say which community they're from
meta:293757
When you get a new ability, including the initial ones when you join a community, we send a notification. The notification in the top bar includes the community name, but the inbox does not:
Notification:
Inbox:
This can be confusing -- it confused a new user who joined several communities and thought these were duplicates (a bug), when it was actually ability notices from different communities. I assume there are reasons the inbox doesn't show the community, but we could avert confusion if the notice itself included the name, something like "you've earned the Participate ability on Software Development". Or if we can add the community to the inbox for all notifications, that's fine too -- just looking for a way to handle this ambiguity.
While the inbox not showing the community can cause confusion in other cases, you usually get a title (post, thread, etc), so you'll still get a hint about the community. But half a dozen "you've earned Participate" all look the same.
Updated suggestion (see comments on this issue): let's add the community name and maybe a small logo to all entries in the full inbox, for consistency and extra clarity.
Would showing the community's logo next to each message in the inbox help make it more immediately obvious that the abilities are in different communities?
This could be in addition to also adding the name of the community to inbox messages or the specific notification wording as described - just mentioning in case it's of interest. I probably wouldn't want the logo to be the only indication because some communities/instances might not have logos, and not all devices / browsers / assistive technologies show images.
Sounds like a good idea to me -- small logos would provide a visual clue when scanning the page, and text is still important for accessibility and non-unique logos.