If you’ve been tuning in to Hot Off the Press, you’ll know about recent updates to the WordPress.com interface along with some fantastic technical upgrades. To continue the momentum, we’ve introduced more interactive and robust notifications throughout WordPress.com. (Coming soon to a Jetpack blog near you.) Keep an eye on the new interface and let us know what you think!
Why the change?
We care about giving our users a streamlined and consistent experience across their devices. Unlike the old design, our new notifications look practically identical whether you are looking at them on a computer or on your Android or iOS device.
Under the hood, we’ve completely rebuilt notifications for faster performance. Better yet, if you are a developer you can grab the raw data yourself from our new API, which is much cleaner than before. We want to empower you with information, giving you the creative freedom to innovate, integrate, and inspire with your own applications and uses of the data.
What makes the new interface better?
Notifications keep you social, allowing you to stay up-to-date with your blogs and comments effortlessly. The new look has been completely redesigned to emphasize simplicity and usability on touch devices such as tablets and smart phones. But don’t worry, desktop users — you can still use keyboard shortcuts to get through your list quickly.
You can see all of your notifications with infinite scroll, moderate and reply to comments, and see who’s liking your posts and following your blog without ever leaving the notifications window. Thanks to some back-end improvements, changes to your notifications instantly synchronize between your computer and mobile devices.
What’s next?
In the coming weeks, we’ll have a Jetpack update that will display the same new notifications window on your self-hosted sites.
Our design teams have been working hard to make sure that we improve our user experience with each iteration of WordPress.com. Our most valuable feedback comes from you. Please let us know how you like the new notifications or how you think they could be better.
