If I understood correctly, there is no way you can track if a user is reading a message, even if he has the chat open in front of him. As in real life (just a simple example) if someone is in front of a person talking it doesn't necessarily mean he is listening. If this is such a big issue that will break the product, the only idea I can think of is that the client explicitly receives or stops receiving messages: The client has to click a button to receive new messages The client has to click a button to turn the chat off These are not the most convenient ways of following a chat (specially the first one) but you can be sure that they explicitly decided to receive or stop receiving the messages (afaik, if they read them or not is not possible to track).

I think, the red color has two points of view. One is used for Dangerous, another one is used for Alert or Something Important to see immediately. In these both are different. The Dangerous sign is mostly used with Exclamation mark (!) or Skull. But the Important sign is used with anything except these two signs.

There are certain things at play here, when looking at the variant which shows the number of items. One of them is that it's an (upcoming) convention. Most people that have come into contact with notifications, have found this way of implementing it and will almost automatically associate it with being "notifications". More so, not complying could actually give more room for interpretation as to what these colored balls mean. There's a chance it could even be completely missed out as it blends into the icon thus allowing for a slip to occur. Another point, is simply the fact of quickly and easily reading of changes in the system, e.g. linkedIn shows me a 3 pending connections, as I'm still on the fence for those connections I'll let them 'be', however, when I look some time later, I see that another request came in, as the number has increased to 4. This may seem as a small thing, but in some situations it actually comes as a 'reward' to users, and behaves just like drugs e.g. facebook with a lot of friend requests = "I'm popular". Related to my previous statement, it also works as a reminder that there is stuff going on, the reminder part is very explicit in e-mail apps where the amount of unread messages is displayed or it also indicates if something is going terribly wrong e.g. many errors in a system could potentially be a very dangerous situation. This is also true when overwhelming the user with unneeded notifications, for which the user will only see it as a nuisance, after which either they will be completely ignored, or the user will simply delete your app as it causes too much stress! Conclusion In most cases I'd show the number of log-items, as users will not likely be offended by this information. Even more, I wouldn't even put more than one ball on top, as, especially for colorblind people, this might not be clear what they all mean just by looking at the color. As an another answer nicely suggested, this would only make sense for binary status notifications e.g. user is online/offline. More reading material http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/05/the-psychology-of-notifications/ interesting article regarding the correct usage of notifications and their timing http://www.sitepoint.com/5-mobile-design-patterns-successful-app/ http://therecoveringpolitician.com/contributors/jyb3/john-ys-musings-from-the-middle-facebook-and-dopamine http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/understanding-conventions-when-being-unique-is-a-bad-thing/ http://www.errordiary.org/?page_id=7339

1. Yes. Payments are often time-sensitive and important tasks, so informing your user of one using a notification badge is good practice. As for the badge on the individual sub-menus, I like them; they let users know how many of each notification they need to deal with. However, the current design of two red corner badges is a bit redundant. You might try something like this: download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups Or, to keep things clean, consistent, and readable, move the Payments badge to the left as well: download bmml source Note: A disadvantage of this method is plurality, as "one payments" wouldn't read well. 2. Depends. If the Payment History requires user action, then its notification count should be displayed. If it's a list simply for reference and doesn't require the user's attention, then it should not be displayed. Imagine if every previous post on your social media platform of choice was totaled in with your notifications, and you couldn't get rid of it. Users gain satisfaction from addressing notifications and having them removed.

Notification seems like the most obvious solution. It's large, in your face, and will have minimal confusion. The others could be confused with the actions of other extensions, not the best UX.

If the user already had the app opened, let's say the email app, you would want to return them to the email they were viewing and if the app is just opening I would open it at the home screen for that app. This seems to be a very standard behaviour across iOS apps . The UI should be extremely clear what the notifications are referring to though, so the user can act on them (especially if you are not notifying them of something that has updated on the main screen). So for SnapChat, they take you to the camera view when you open the app but it's clear on the UI how to see the notifications. And for the Mailbox app, they take you to the email overview (which is what the notifications are for) but it's still clear on that UI that those emails are what it was notifying you of.

There are many examples of this in current apps, where it is either a function of a word processor or an accessibility feature. A quick google brings back quite a few options:search?q=increase+text+size+accessibility See here (at the bottom of the article) for Microsofts implementation. https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Change-the-font-size-931e064e-f99f-4ba4-a1bf-8047a35552be?ui=en-US&rs=en-GB&ad=GB The relavant asci symbols may exist to create something similar as seen below. A↑ A↓ A https://www.toptal.com/designers/htmlarrows/arrows/

I think Option 2 is the best of the 3 because it allows the user to immediately make a decision about what content they want to see and it does not duplicate notifications, making the screen less mentally busy. Option 1 just lets the user know they have notifications, if the user only cares about cart items and the 5 notifications are about Section 2 items, then they will feel like their time has been wasted. Option 2 allows the user to choose and only look at new information about cart items and not worry about Section 2 items for the moment, or vice versa. Option 3 gives the same decision-making ability to the user as option 2, but it is duplicating information and could be confusing to some users. That said, some users might appreciate a way to see past notifications all in one place, but I would hide it in a submenu or screen so that it doesn't distract non-power users.

User engagement is not always a good thing, since users may pick up negative feelings if we keep them hooked to an app with little to no value. Tristan Harris works with attention and ethical use of users' time. Here is a great article about it: Redesign Attention Economy. In my opinion, numbers add urgency to the badge. They may modify user behaviour and add to stress levels by pushing users to pay constant attention to apps. Numbers act as a reminder of how many tasks need to be done. When doing testing designs with numbered badges, users often comment the need to "clean" badges, to tidy up after themselves. This may hurt their focus to their current workflow or task. I realised some products are removing those numbers on badges. On my Android phone, I don't get the numbers anymore but just a simple badge. I don't know whether this is due to limiting space/clutter or to improve users' cognitive wellness. The way I see it is: If we are talking about productivity apps that require the user to take instant action, numbers may make sense. For most apps, just the badge will be enough. It may disrupt less users and be more protective of our short-span attention.

Give the users more control and don't apply filters they haven't set already. On the main page you can "suggest" properties but other than that, if the user has different criteria in mind you can not impose a property on them. A good case study for this situation is AirBnB. They show everything available on minimal criteria (city and dates) and then suggest hosts that are "superhosts" then everybody else. The user can than add the filter for only superhosts to be shown or not.

The main information the color conveys isn't just that there are different types, but that the types have varying levels of difficulty. The bronze < silver < gold metaphor has been used for ages, so any new symbols should try to convey that sense of escalation. Edit: Thanks to the comments from GammaGames and Woodrow Barlow, here is a smaller mockup, where there is also less color contrast between foreground and background when they are next to someone's name.