Before you dive into implementing alerts, notifications, and confirmations, let's take a few minutes and think about what each of these items mean. I think this is important, because if you end up passively notifying the user about an error, it can easily get missed. Here are my definitions of the types of information that you'll want to display:

• Alert: Something important just happened and you need to ensure that the user sees what's going on. Possibly, the user needs to acknowledge the alert.
• Notification: Something happened but it's not important enough to completely block what the user is doing. These typically go away on their own.

Confirmation is actually part of an alert. For example, if the user has just performed an action, and then wants to make sure that it was successful before carrying on, they would have to confirm that they've seen the information in order to close the modal. A confirmation could also exist within an alert, warning the user about an action that they're about to perform.

The trick is to try to use notifications where the information is good to know, but not critical. Use confirmations only when the workflow of the feature cannot continue without the user acknowledging what's going on. In the following sections, you'll see examples of alerts and notifications used for different purposes.