UX revamp - notifications

What

• Implement the first phase of the notification changes
  • main notifications 
  • progress bars
  • inline notifications
  • modal dialogues
  • output tray badges 
• outscoped elements
  • invitation to feedback (needs non-trivial infrastructure for facilitating creation of and harvesting of results)
• OPEN
  • how to deal with agentic AI - will the reverse prompts be notifications or part of the flow otherwise? 

Why

• Current notifications are easy to miss, leading to user confusion and suboptimal workflows 

Dependencies

• None

User stories / Acceptance criteria

• As a user I want to be boldly notified by Qt Creator if there's something that I need to interact with
  • modal dialogues stop me from doing anything else until I've reacted 
  • deferrable notifications allow me to react later
• As a user I want to have glanceable and consistent notifications - colors and iconography intuitively stating the importance of the information, especially all notifications shall be able to carry information about the severity (categorized to info / warning / error) 
• As Qt I want to harmonize all notifications to be visually equivalent (and support themeing)
  • dialogues are essentially modal notifications
  • some notifications can be ephemeral / self-closing 
• As a user I want to hide my pending deferrable notifications and return to them later 
• As a user I want to understand what the notifications are about (→ the payload has to be self-sufficient or contain a link to further information)
  • Hence the notification must be able to stretch vertically in order to display a couple of lines of text
• Progress bars shall not be interleaved with the other notifications in order to keep the window content from being too chaotically reordered automatically 
• Progress bar monitoring a task that ends in an error shall be converted to a notification (possibly with additional error-specific payload) 
• Progress bars shall be combinable (so that progress in multiple tasks is tracked in a singular bar)
• As a user I want to know whether there's new content in the output trays of Qt Creator (e.g. issues, outputs etc). This shall be done using a badge to be presented atop the name of the tray
  • The badge content shall be defined on a per-tray -basis - on issues it makes sense to have the count listed, on most others the fact that there's new output is sufficient. 
• As a user I want to understand to which project information in an output tray applies (or whether the information is generic in nature) 

Tasks

• define vocabulary for notifications if terms are not fully defined in current documentation
• list current notifications 
• list dialogues 
  • evaluate whether a dialogue has to stay modal 
• list inline notifications 
• list output trays 
• define lifecycles for the notification categories
• precise design & implementation tasks to be defined