We try to protect people attention by making the difference between:
Activity Indicators (badges) that are non-persistent and just show there has been activity - but that do not mandatorily require your personal attention
Notifications that are persistent and require your personal attention.
How do these 2 mechanisms work?
Activity Indicators
Activity Indicators are meant to show something happen somewhere else (not on the page you are currently displaying).
As these indicators are not meant to be managed nor acknowledged like a notification, they go away according to your navigation like badges on a mobile.
Activity Indicators include different types of events: Notifications and Direct Messages (that require to be marked as read), as well as simple badges (red points that go away as they get displayed according to user navigation).
In other words, basic activities will go off as they get displayed, while Notifications and Direct Messages remain displayed until marked as read.
Important note:
Badges show a “red point” when there are only simple activities, and if there are any notifications for you, the red point is replaced by a number which tells you how many notifications are waiting for your action.
By changing the setting Notify me on conversation, a new conversation or a new comment can be considered either as a notification or an activity indicators. More on this at the end of this article.
If you are displaying a workspace, subjects where there has been activity - and that are listed on the left(*) - will get an activity indicator until you navigate to:
1/ the workspace main Activity page which will remove all of the activity indicators for this workspace globally
2/ each subject individually to remove activity indicators subject by subject
3/ another workspace (read below for detailed behaviour in this case)
When you navigate to another workspace, the current type of page will be kept:
If you are on the main Activity page it will go to the main Activity page of the next workspace you select and remove activity indicators accordingly.
If you are on My Tasks or a Subject’s Tasks tab it will go to My Tasks (to remain on tasks). Please note navigating this way will preserve individual activity indicators for subjects that are displayed at the left.
(*) Starred subjects, default list of alphabetically ordered joined subjects and open subjects can get an activity indicator badge. Subjects that are not listed on the left will not show an activity indicator.
Notifications
Notifications are persistent objects that appear under the bell icon - plus, depending on your personal settings, notifications can be pushed by instant individual email, as a digest email, and/or as a mobile push notification on the locked screen until you explicitly mark them as read. You can also mark notifications as unread to get back on them later.
A notification can be triggered by different events like comments on conversations or tasks if:
you previously interacted with the conversation by starting it, commenting on it, liking it or creating a task from it, are assigned or subscribed to a task
you have been mentioned in a conversation or task comment thread - which is the recommended way to raise someone attention
you get reminded of due dates on tasks, or membership requests on subjects you manage
an import, an export, or a subject's copy has completed
and even for every new message on a subject you are a members of.
You can make this more or less verbose and persistent by updating your Notifications settings:
Recommendations:
1/ use @mentions as much as required to trigger persistent notifications, if you really want to not remove activity indicators when you navigate, being on a Tasks page will not cause the subjects badges to go away.
2/ update the above Notifications settings so they reflect how you'd like a new conversation or comment to either
be considered as a notification (persistent) or
display an activity indicator (non-persistent).
More on this here :
http://help.azendoo.com/notifications/in-app-notifications/notification-settings