Where a notification takes you

A notification card is a doorway rather than a message. Clicking it marks it read and takes you to whatever it concerns, in one action.

Pages and panels

Some notifications open a page. Others open a panel over what you were already looking at. Which one you get depends on the thing being pointed at, and the panel is usually the better outcome — you deal with the item and carry on, without losing your place.

The practical consequence is that clicking a notification is cheap. There is no need to guess from the card whether something is worth opening, and no need to mark it read separately afterwards.

What generates them

Notifications come from a fairly small set of events, and they fall into two groups worth telling apart.

Things aimed at you personally: a direct message, a mention, a thread mention or reply, a reaction to something you wrote, being assigned a task, a comment on one of your tasks, being mentioned on a task, or an approval or workflow step waiting on you. These almost always need a response from you specifically.

Things keeping you informed: general announcements and alerts, reminders, task start reminders, and being added as a watcher. A watcher notification in particular is telling you something is happening, not asking you to do it.

Reading the card before you click

Because both groups arrive in one list, the useful question on each card is which group it belongs to. Anything in the first group deserves opening now. Anything in the second can usually be marked read, unless it is a reminder about something you had genuinely forgotten.

Reminders and task start reminders are the exception in the second group. They are the notifications you asked for yourself, and ignoring them defeats the point of having set them.

If a click seems to do nothing

Check whether a panel has opened over the page rather than assuming nothing happened. The card will also have moved out of the unread list, which is a reliable sign that the click registered.