Comment 34 for bug 206547

Pēteris, sorry, but you're mistaken. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines> has said the same thing on this topic since I wrote it a year ago: "When a notification is not time-critical, and there is a relevant window to display it in, present the notification as a banner or other text in that window ... if the window is not currently open, you can open it automatically, in the background to minimize accidental clicks."

Anyway, one of my colleagues has just completed a week of user testing of the upstream version of Empathy, with 16 separate participants. We'll publish full results in a couple of weeks, but one notable preliminary result is that for many of the participants, when someone started a new conversation with them, or tried to send them a file, and Empathy showed this using its notification area item, they just didn't notice.