Comment 3 for bug 1304073

I believe it's also worth noting that the way the icons get highlighted when they need attention has changed as well. In 13.10 and prior, all four sides of the icon highlighted. In 14.04, it's just two of the four sides (left + top sides). In some cases it seems that only the top edge of the icon when highlighted shows any difference, and even then it looks nearly identical when I click on the icon, thereby removing the highlight. Meanwhile, the left side of the icon that also gets highlighted seems to not change.

I understand that these items were changed as part of the conversion process to SVG, allowing them to scale up and look great on HiDPI screens. While I support this very much, it really does feel like a usability regression as it is now more difficult to tell when an application needs attention. If *everything* supported the Message Tray, this would be less of an issue as a user could just look there and see what took place. To be quite frank, the Message Tray certainly isn't supported by all applications, so you might see my angle on this now.

Take into consideration that somebody may get up from their computer for a moment and come back several moments later. If the icons do not clearly depict that they received a message, or somebody highlighted them on IRC, etc., they wouldn't otherwise know. Given the fact that the current highlight is less obvious and the pips are smaller (making it more difficult to tell if a pip is blue or white to signify the difference), suddenly it becomes a burden to the user.

Thinking it was the fact that I had selected "colored edges" for the "icon backgrounds" feature, I set everything back to default, just as it comes out of the box in 14.04, so then the icons had a solid color background without any colored edges. Sadly, this was no change (if anything, it was slightly worse since I didn't even have two of the four highlighted edges). In that case, I had to rely entirely on the color of the now smaller pips, which is cumbersome and quite a hassle. I still believe that having the ability to scale the pips independently would be a wildly effective method so the user may choose based on their preference, but with how close we are to release, at the very least I would favor seeing a more 13.10-ish size of pips on my 14.04 installs.

Based on my conversations with users, it sounds like a lot of people don't notice this change. That said, I certainly notice when my messages go missed until I happen to message them again when they are in front of their system, thanks to the notification in the upper right corner on their display. :)

Again, thank you for your time and efforts. Have a great day!