I've read in books and a website that discussed great UI design that you shouldn't "bother" the user with too much feedback or message boxes and pop ups. I also think that as a user, I'd like to know that the button I've just pressed has done it's job. I searched SO but mostly it was jQuery and websites.
I have a form that has a button called "export" and the actual exporting happens so very quickly that I wanted to alert the user to the fact it has finished and been successful. What do you think is my best option?
- to have a progress bar? - it would finish quickly but I didn't want to just leave it on the form at 100% ... ideally, it would disappear once a user wanted to do something else on the form and shouldn't get in the way of them quitting the program. Perhaps be at 100% and visible but as soon as a user touched a control (checkbox, textbox etc) it would disappear?
- A message on the form that lasts for a few seconds post-success but I don't want to freeze the program up while I wait ... this sounds like it would use threading that I've not really worked much with yet.
- Something else?
Answer
Gmail takes a good approach. Similar to your option 2, the success message is displayed in an unobtrusive place on the screen, but it remains until the user takes another action.
The position of the message is the key. Because it doesn't obscure any information or controls, it doesn't impede a user's ability to ignore the message and continue performing tasks, but it still lets the paranoid verify that the previous task completed successfully.
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