A taxonomy for alerts and notifications

Is it an Alert, Toast, Callout, Popup, Snackbar, or Notification?

Steve Dennis
UX Collective
Published in
5 min readMar 6, 2023

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Three callouts, one blue information one saying “Heads up”, an orange warning saying “You sure?” and a red error saying “Sorry.”

A while back, in the early days of our design system, we had a ticket for a component sitting in our backlog, with the title “Alert.” My initial reaction was “Oh yeah, a colored box with a little icon to the left of it and some text, easy.” Oh dear reader, how naive I was…

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Senior Design Manager @ Onfido, writing about design systems, product design, leadership, and tech @ clipcontent.substack.com.