Monday, October 21, 2019

gui design - Should I display "no alarms" info in a summary view?


There is certain summary overview in the system that my team is developing. In this summary overview one section is dedicated to displaying active alarms. My team and I had a discussion how to handle the situation when there are no active alarms.


Should we display description "No active alarms" or such or should the alarm area remain empty?


Things of note that alarm section is in upper middle part of the view and it takes about of quarter of width of screen and is about 150px tall. The alarms are communicated using alarm cards with only color, icon and number.


EDIT: I hesitated with mocks since our app is terribly work-in-progress, but here they are: no alarms mock mock with some alarms



Answer



If the user sees an empty area where there is supposed to be a list of elements (whether it is one or more) he could think:



  • there are no items

  • there might be items but they are not showing up: still not loaded, some error, etc.



If the user sees a "no items" message the only thing he can think is:



  • there are no items


So, in my opinion, it is a good idea to reinforce the state of the element, even if it might sound unnecessary, to prevent make the user think.


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