In terms of practical use (including helping users avoid forgetting about things they need to do), Asana's Inbox is an inspired design. Here's a brief comparison of Asana's Inbox to Freshdesk's Notifications pulldown:
- Notifications go into Asana's Inbox. Not really different so far.
- Asana's Inbox list (notifications) are a central focus of the page, not a tiny pulldown.
- Asana Inbox entries (notifications) have an X button next to each so user can remove the entry once he's done with it. This is beautiful! Empty list = no more notifications to attend to.
- Freshdesk notifications are bold until clicked on. If you accidentally click on one, it will be un-bolded, increasing the risk you will fail to attend to it. This is avoidable, inherent risk of error — broken UX. There is no way to remove just one entry from the list and, less importantly, no way to mark an entry bold again.
These may seem like minor differences. They are in fact major differences. The Asana Inbox approach creates a framework that inherently reduces the chance of errors (the primary error being thinking you attended to a notification, but you actually didn't attend to it, resulting in reduced quality of customer service).
This is a case where the SaaS vendor (Asana) really considered the problem and found a solution that delights, rather than settling for a solution that seems okay on the surface, but which is actually pretty shallow.
