Feature request: Clearer urgency levels for admin notifications, with neurodiv

TL;DR

‘I’d like to suggest a standardised priority or severity system for WordPress admin notifications.

At present, a genuinely urgent security or functionality problem can use very similar high-attention visual language to an optional feature, recommendation or setup prompt. This can create unnecessary cognitive load and anxiety, particularly for some neurodivergent users, while also causing alert fatigue that makes genuinely important warnings easier to overlook.

In simple terms:

If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.

A system such as Critical / Attention / Information / Optional, using colour alongside icons and accessible text labels, could make it much easier to understand what actually requires action.

Optional choices should also be clearly identified as optional and, once a user has consciously declined or dismissed something, that decision should persist rather than continuing to generate an alert.The longer version

I’d like to suggest a standardised priority or severity system for notifications throughout the WordPress admin area.

At the moment, very different types of notification can use essentially the same high-attention visual language: a red badge, red warning or persistent alert.

That might represent a genuine security or functionality issue, but it can also represent an optional feature, recommendation or marketing/setup suggestion.’

______________

My concern is:

If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.

I’d love to see WordPress establish a standard that Core and plugin developers could use to classify notifications by urgency. For example:

• Critical / action required – security issues, broken functionality, failed processes or something requiring prompt intervention.
• Attention recommended – something that should be reviewed, but is not an emergency.
• Information / optional setup – new features, configuration suggestions or non-essential recommendations.
• Marketing / promotional – ideally without an attention-demanding notification badge at all.

This shouldn’t rely on colour alone. Colours could be paired with icons and accessible text labels such as “Critical”, “Attention” and “Information”, so the system also works for users with colour-vision differences, screen readers and other accessibility needs.

I’d also suggest that where a notification represents an optional choice, there should be a way to permanently acknowledge or decline it.

If a user has consciously reviewed something and decided not to enable it, the interface shouldn’t continue presenting that decision as unresolved.Why I’m suggesting this from a neurodivergent perspective

I’m a neurodivergent WordPress site owner, and persistent high-priority-looking notifications can create a surprisingly significant cognitive burden for me.

If I investigate a red notification today and discover that it is harmless or optional, seeing the same red alert again later doesn’t necessarily mean my brain instantly retrieves the previous conclusion of:

“I’ve already checked that and it’s fine.”

Instead, I can find myself effectively starting the assessment again:

What is wrong? Has something changed? Is the site secure? Did an update fail? Do I need to deal with this now?

That repeated assessment process can create unnecessary anxiety and cognitive load.

I don’t mean to suggest that every neurodivergent person experiences interfaces in exactly the same way, but some of us can find persistent alerts, ambiguity and unresolved-looking tasks particularly difficult to mentally filter out.

At the same time, the opposite problem develops.

If high-attention warnings repeatedly turn out to be harmless recommendations, users become conditioned to ignore them. Then a genuinely important notification risks being overlooked.

It becomes a digital version of “the website that cried wolf.”

A recent example for me was an optional Google/WooCommerce Enhanced Conversions feature producing a red notification count in the WordPress admin menu.

I had deliberately decided not to enable the feature, but the red notification remained because the optional setup task was technically “incomplete”.

On the same morning I had dealt with an actual WordPress update problem which temporarily left my website unavailable, as well as a genuine security-related notification.

From a user’s perspective, the interface was therefore using similar attention-demanding signals for both:

“Your website may require urgent attention.”

and

“There is an optional feature you haven’t enabled.”

Those shouldn’t occupy the same urgency channel.

A second example while creating this WordPress.org account

Ironically, while creating an account so that I could submit this feedback, I encountered another example of the same underlying issue: the interface requiring the user to work out information that it already knows.

The registration form contains a checkbox saying:

“Pineapple is delicious on pizza”

As a literal-thinking neurodivergent user, I interpreted that as exactly what it says, a statement I was being asked to agree with, so I left it unticked.

The form then refused to create the account and displayed only:

“Please try again.”

There was no indication that the checkbox was required and no validation message explaining what needed correcting.

That meant I had to start troubleshooting possibilities such as my username, email address, privacy consent or browser, even though the system already knew exactly why registration had failed.

I appreciate that the checkbox is intended as humour, and I’m certainly not suggesting WordPress can’t have personality. But clear labelling of required/optional choices and specific validation messages would remove unnecessary ambiguity, particularly for literal thinkers and users who benefit from explicit interface language.

The same pattern continued when the account entered a pending-approval state. There was no estimated approval time or indication of whether the delay was normal or whether I needed to take action. After more than two days, I eventually contacted support and learned that the account had entered a particular half-approved state requiring manual intervention.

Again, the underlying issue was not the existence of a process, but that the user was required to infer what the state meant and what action was expected.

This suggests a broader accessibility principle:

If the interface already knows whether something is urgent, required, optional or awaiting user action, the user shouldn’t have to work it out.

What I’d like to see:

I think WordPress could improve the admin and account experience by establishing some consistent principles:

• Standardised notification severity levels.
• High-attention red alerts reserved for genuine problems requiring action.
• Different visual treatment for recommendations and optional features.
• Icons and text labels as well as colour.
• Persistent dismissal or “No thanks” choices for optional notifications.
• Clear labelling when actions or form fields are required or optional.
• Specific validation messages rather than generic errors where the system knows what went wrong.
• Clear status information where a process requires waiting, including whether user action is needed.

Although I’m raising this from a neurodivergent perspective, I think clearer prioritisation would benefit everyone.

It could reduce anxiety and cognitive load for users who struggle with ambiguous or persistent notifications, while simultaneously making genuine security and functionality warnings more noticeable and effective.

Ultimately, a warning system only works if users can trust its sense of urgency.

If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.