Many apps show informational messages to users in a pane at the top or bottom of the sceen. Often these are shown sliding down after an important operation completes like saving data or sending messages. Usually these panes vanish after the next navigation or when the user manually dismisses them. They are not generally used for error messages or other critical info, but rather for informational messages that can be safely ignored but are important enough that users might want to know what happened.

What are these informational panes called? Extra credit: what are best practices for using these panes?

I'm trying to Google for examples and best practices for this pattern done well, but without a name my Googling isn't going well. :-(


  • "Welcome back -username-, you've been logged in. Click here to refresh the page." on all stack exchanges sites. FWIW, I find the content of these messages very confusing, but I don't mind the UI used.
  • "Do you want to save password for this site" shown in pale yellow in Chrome, IE, etc. They're shown on the next page so you don't have to wait modally.

What you're referring to is called Banner Notification on iOS and has no apparent name (as far as I know) on Android. On Android this kind of message is sometimes called a Notification Bar, but I feel that this is misleading since the notification bar is also what contains the notifications in an Android device as a pull-down list.

But if you cross-reference your searches with Banner Notification when searching for examples of this notification technique you will find a range of examples.

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The official name for these is in iOS Banner alerts, a product of the Notification center.

The notification can have one out of three alert types, where this is the one called Banner alerts.

At our company, we have made an android version of this, which also was dubbed BannerAlert.

Banner Alert on iPad

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