For our intranet application we have little notification messages (toasts) that indicate successful operations like "information saved," "logged out" etc. Most of them are not important enough to require a modal operation (like Stack Exchange's "click to close" windows) so they close automatically after 2500ms and I'm trying to make them disrupt the user as little as possible. They are however important to present as users need confirmation an action was successful as it may be part of a repetitive or complex workflow.
I want to make sure they're readable and understandable within the time frame so I was wondering if there was any research on how long it takes people to read information especially in a "pop up" style context. It's not actually a pop up window, more like SE's notification bar but it automatically goes away. If I could ballpark how long to expect reading to take it would help tune the duration of the message and the length of messages.
Answer
For what it's worth - I tried a variety of timings myself and ended up at 3200ms for a two line message of up to about 20 words. But I also place a small dot (10px diameter) to the left, which is coloured according to message type (eg red/error, blue/info, orange/warning) and which fades out over the 3200ms. When the fade gets to 100%, the message itself fades out quickly. Users said they like it because it makes the message slightly more noticeable without being too distracting and it made it less of a 'surprise' when the message disappears.
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