readability - Is OK/NOK better than "fail/success"

My team is discussing how we should indicate, in a logbook, whether a specific action ended with success or not. I started putting it like

timestamp | action name (fail)    | description

timestamp | action name (success) | description

One of the team members suggested replacing fail/success with OK/NOK:

timestamp | first action name (OK)    | description
timestamp | 2nd action name (NOK)     | description

I wouldn't mind such a detail, if he didn't say it would improve readability. I doubt it:

1. OK and NOK correlate to 66 %, so arguably when quickly going through a lot of text, it is probable to confuse NOK for OK. To the contrary, fail has 0 correlation with success.


2. fail has a varying letter height, which success doesn't, making them look very different.

Am I thinking in the right direction? Is there any resource where I can read about such details? I believe something like this should be very well known in the area of cockpit or nuclear power plant control room design.

Answer

It appears that the biggest problem is being able to find the status indicators within a large group of text.

Barring some significant technical limitation, I would say your solution should be to display the status of each action in its own column.

This makes your question of exact terminology much less important by

• Reducing the importance of terminology for the sake of visibility


• Providing a clear, easy to scan column that displays the statuses in a consistent location

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But to actually answer your question, I'd go with the "fail/success" pair without considering the exact context in which you're displaying this information.