Customers often mention missing important stuff because there's so much in their Hey! menu. You hear people talk about spending time clearing away the stuff that doesn’t matter.
Surfacing what's relevant to each person would be complex, but there's a simple place to start: pulling out @mentions into their own section in the Hey! menu. Mentions are essentially non-private Pings—someone is calling you out specifically. When people talk about narrowing things down to the important stuff, more often than not, that means mentions. Mentions almost always require clicking through and following up.
A customer described it this way:
As of right now when I'm mentioned, it gets blended in with the rest of a hey stack and I have to look for the little @ symbol to see what I've been mentioned in. Not only that but after I review what I was mentioned in it gets pushed down into the rest of the read messages. If I need to revisit something that I couldn't fully address at the time I have to remember to click don't forget or go search for it later. This causes some productivity issues.
An important @mention being lost in a sea of to-do added or card moved message makes Basecamp seem noisy, especially for those just getting started.
Appetite
We have a 2-week appetite for this.
Solution
Create a new section at the top of the Hey! menu called New mentions Let's add @mentions to the top of the Hey! menu. I recommend calling this section "New mentions" and renaming "New for you" to "New activity".
The updated Hey! menu with a mentions section at the top and a collapsed Previous Notifications section.
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Since the sections are independent, you could have something in New activity that is newer than a mention above it, which is a little strange. It's also a good reason to make them sections instead of just sorting @mentions to the top.
Also...
If it's not too cluttered, it would be great to show Mark all read next to both sections. I think it will be common to clear out activity while still working through your mentions.
Can we drop the "Mentioned you:" prefix since all mentions are in the Mentions section? The catch is, once it's read you'll lose that context, so we can experiment and see how annoying a bunch of "Mentioned you:" is in practice 🙂
The mobile team will figure out the best way to incorporate this change
Previous notifications page I thought we'd want to group mentions on the previous notifications page, too, but then you'd have two infinitely scrollable sections on top of each other. That won't work!
So, I think they should stay how they are, which has the plus of matching "Previous notifications" in the Hey! menu itself.
Text snippets
We'd also like to include the text snippet around where you were mentioned. You currently don't get any context about the mention — is it a question, urgent, just a cc?
