User and Social Experience Design
It can be an efficient way of providing unobtrusive feedback and make an interface feel cleaner and smarter but doesn't work in every situation.
I had trouble with this again this evening so please excuse me while I rant.
Transient feedback is feedback that shows up for a few seconds then either slides away, fades to white, goes through some other type of transition or simply disappears although I think the recent attraction to transient feedback is because of the ease of implementing animations through jQuery animate(), YUI’s ColorAnim() etc and other frameworks and patterns.
Transient feedback can work. For example if you’ve just added an item to a list then a common feedback mechanism is to highlight the item with a yellow background then fade the yellow out to show users where the new item has been added or as a more subtle confirmation of successful completion of the operation rather than perhaps how we might have done it in the old days of the web with a modal JavaScript alert box.
Transient feedback in this instance can work because it doesn’t really matter if the user misses it – the operation has still been completed, explicit confirmation might not be necessary and they can still see the new item in the list. Also, as the operation is taking place instantly the user is unlikely to be distracted between when they initiate the operation and the completion of the operation. A well-performing interface executing a basic text item add to a list on the same interface should run in under 100 milliseconds.
However transient feedback doesn’t work in cases such as when you get your username or password wrong while logging into Twitter. Twice this evening I logged into Twitter then immediately switched to another tab on my browser, came back later and wondered why I was at the login screen again. I assumed Twitter was being flaky again – it does that sometimes where the script breaks and doesn’t authenticate properly. So I logged in again, same thing. Finally I logged in and waited without moving away from the page. That time I saw the “Wrong username/password” error message for the few seconds it was displayed before fading out. Frustrating!
There are no hard and fast rules to this, like with many aspects of user interaction and user experience design. It all depends on the unique circumstances of user goals, technology, environment and many other parameters. Testing sites in a usability lab won’t pick up problems like I have with the Twitter login because it’s unlikely scenarios would involve users being distracted with other tasks and their environment to the extent required to “break” the experience. When using transient feedback think about the time delay before the system provides feedback to the user and if they might have gotten distracted or whether other elements on the screen might take their attention. Think about why you’re using transient feedback – is it just a 2.0 gimmick or does it provide a better experience by reducing excise, preserving real estate and reducing screen clutter and conveying feedback at a level of priority suitable for the content and context of the feedback.
// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
