Important information
Before you dive into implementing alerts, notifications, and confirmations, let's take a few minutes and think about what each of these items means. I think this is important because if you end up passively notifying the user about an error, it can easily get missed. Here are my definitions of the types of information that you'll want to display:
- Alert: Something important just happened, and you need to ensure that the user sees what's going on. Possibly, the user needs to acknowledge the alert.
- Confirmation: This is part of an alert. For example, if the user has just performed an action and then wants to make sure that it was successful before carrying on, they would have to confirm that they've seen the information in order to close the modal. A confirmation can also exist within an alert, warning the user about an action that they're about to perform.
- Notification: Something happened but it's not important enough...