How to make new MSG messages more obvious? – part II
In order to test out the options I listed I tried some of them out this morning on a few people in KMi. I gave people a task – looking for particular materials on the site and posting a message to a forum and asked them to respond to any message notifications they may receive. I tested with 3 people (ok, not a huge sample!!), and each of them had notifications with two different types of notification (text appearing in the banner and the popup layer).
However, not a single person noticed the new message notifications 
So guess that means we’re going to have to come up with something slightly more annoying 
Yeah – *DEFINITELY* going to have to move to a lower-right-corner popup notification a la
MSG Alert, GTalk, MSN Messenger, and many others
Why don’t you consider using a blinking orange light (as they do with traffic lights
after hours in many countries)? & Maybe greying out the green and red.
Alternatively you might put the pop up box over the top of the ‘MSG status’.
(perhaps with a delay, after logging on). People (westerners)do tend to read left to right.
and younger ones tend to notice when something is missing rather than additions.