Notifications are easy to dismiss by mistake

[Albert Vaca <albertvaka gmail com>]

Hi,

As of now, notification popups on Gnome are considered "read" and disappear after the user has hovered them with the mouse and then moved the mouse away. 

I think this is good UX design, but in many cases I've found myself "overshooting" the notification (ie: moving the mouse too fast up, going past the notification popup) when trying to reach for it. When this happens, the notification considers it has been hovered and un-hovered and disappears.

Then, if a notification is not persistent, this means you can no longer interact with it, which results in a bad user experience.

I've found myself subconsciously learning to approach notifications slowly and with care to avoid this. Has this happened to you as well? I think we can very easily improve this and have a smoother user experience.

I've thought about two different solutions:

- A potential solution would be to require a minimum amount of time (eg: 200ms) for the cursor to be on the notification until it is considered "read" and can be dismissed on un-hover.

- A different approach would be to just disable this behavior and require the user to click the notification or the "x" button on it, to acknowledge it has been read and dismiss it.

I personally prefer the first option, because I like the auto-dismiss behavior we have, but other desktops like Plasma are opting for the second one. What do you think?

I'm not a Gnome contributor, but I offer myself to implement any solution if we reach a consensus on what to do.

Thanks for your time,

Albert Vaca