Site warning component

[racheledelman]

We tend to use banners to communicate important messages about a site, like labeling a demo site, or saying that a program has shut down.

For example, we use this banner on the GCF demo site:

I'm not convinced that the banners are really effective though. What might be a harder to miss component for cases like this?

[bensheldon]

This is a great question! Here is a great example of a couple different needs/approaches on GCF:

1. We have the Demo Banner. As you note, our experience has been that this is more helpful for expert staff who know to look for it than newcomers.
2. To address this issue with the Demo Banner, we have an explicit offboarding card that slightly into the application flow. This only appears on Demo. I understand this to be highly effective, at least compared to the banner.
3. We also use a (green) Banner to display some Session information. This was a bit of a workaround to ensure that it was highly visible whether an Assister is logged in (which is important for getting "credit"), which was an active trade-off against having a consistent/simple navigation bar.

We also use notice elements for information. I speculate, from personal experience, that they can be fatiguing when overused and subsequently ignored/overlooked by users.