Spike: What customer needs does Badge fulfill?

Badge is a multi-purpose implementation. This is a spike to document those purposes and explore alternative implementations that still satisfy those customer needs.

The following are known customer needs that badge fulfills and proposed alternatives of meeting those needs without using the Badge implementation as it exists today.

- [ ] Notifying the user that there are annotations on a page without opening the sidebar.
- Alternative implementation: Require a hot key press or the user to click on the badge icon prior to retrieving this information. If there are annotations, open the sidebar automatically for the user so they can see them. There could also be some settings inside the extension for when to auto open the sidebar and when not to or an on/off for when to do this for every page vs only pages where you specifically request it. Pros: This gives the user the ability to customize H to fit their usage (aka: you always look for annotations and auto open the sidebar during "on" time when you are making annotations and turn it off when you are not or maybe you are always making annotations so you leave it on all the time), it doesn't send the user's browser history to H by default and thus saves H money while providing user's with the experience they want, it still gives them a means to a fast response yes/no answer while automatically taking them to the annotations they care about.

- [ ] Badge encourages the user to annotate.
- Alternative implementation: If the user has not used H in x amount of weeks, show a banner that says, "We've noticed you haven't annotated in a while! Join the conversation! " or if they've browsed to a page and have been on it for x amount of seconds (as in they appear to be reading it) says something like, "You seem to be enjoying this page! Would you like to add some annotations?". Pros: this is measurable so we can see how effective it is at getting user's to annotate that haven't annotated in a while.

- [ ] The badge count is the only way to know whether there are annotations in a group that isn't the group that's selected in the sidebar.
- Alternative implementation: Show a badge like icon bubble next to groups/use some other indicator so user's know which groups have annotations in them. Pros: this improves the usefulness by indicating which group the annotations are actually in and consolidates features into one service

- [ ] The badge count is the only way to know someone has added an annotation since the last time you visited the page without opening the sidebar and looking at all the annotations.
- Automatically subscribe users to notifications about documents they've annotated and the next time they use activity pages, notify them. Pros: notifications are something our users have been requesting for a long time anyway, it eliminates the need to send the user's browser history to h since it has a scoped notification trigger, it also doesn't force the user to open a url and keep track of how many annotations where present before in order to know if something changed.