Handled items must leave the bundle

What it is

A summary is a window onto the not-yet-handled set. A reply from the shade, a read inside the app, an archive on another device—those members must leave the pile, and the count and preview must follow. Items that stay after they are done turn the card into a lie: it still looks like work, and opening it finds none.

This is the lifecycle of a bundle. It is not how an unread badge is tallied, and not whether vanished items belong in history.

Why it happens

People treat the summary as a to-do. A to-do is a closure: finish one, the set shrinks. If closure never happens, the summary decays from signal to ornament, and the later strategies are swipe-the-pile or never look. Cross-surface sync is where this breaks most often: a reply on the phone, the watch and desktop piles unchanged; a read in-app, the system shade still showing the old preview. The failure is not missing motion. It is that the card no longer stands for work.

Removal is per member, not per card. Handle two of five and three should remain—not the whole card gone, not the whole card frozen. Killing the card also kills untreated members; freezing it teaches that handling does not count.

Studying it

Have people handle a subset from the shade or in-app, then watch whether count, preview, and card presence converge on other surfaces within seconds.

Independent variables: whether handling happened as a notification action, in-app, or on another device; whether the count drops without the preview changing. Dependent variables: dwell of stale members, taps on "nothing left" cards, mistaken whole-pile clears.

Single-device labs miss cross-surface staleness. Use at least two surfaces. Eventual consistency is not a pass—people glance back at the shade in the moment of handling; a pile that still looks old for seconds is read as "the action did not take."

Where it stops holding

An offline queue may lag a few seconds, but returning to the foreground should converge the summary before showing new arrivals. Alerts that must leave an audit trail can leave the shade and remain in a log; those must not be the same to-do card. "Later" is not handled: members should stay or move into an explicit snooze set, not vanish as read. Partial failure (archive succeeded, reply failed) should keep the member on the failed side rather than optimistic-removing the whole item.

Applying it

• Any member that was read, replied, archived, or completed on another device must drop from the same summary on every surface, with count and latest preview rewritten.
• Handling a subset must neither destroy the card nor leave it looking unchanged.
• On failure, keep that member in the pile and mark it unfinished; do not disappear-then-bounce.
• Verify with a summary of 5, read 2 in-app, and look back at the shade immediately. It should show 3 and a preview that is not the two already read. Still showing 5, or a vanished card with 3 still unread, means the lifecycle broke.

Related

• Within the group: H5.04.1 Like items should collapse into one summary · H5.04.2 Bundles must still show how items differ
• Adjacent: H5.05 Badges and unread counts · H5.06 Actionable notifications · H5.11 Notification history and replay
• Search terms: stale bundle · handled leaves group · cross-device notification sync