Visibility of system status

Designers usually read usecases, requirements and they know a lot about system. The interface looks familiar to them. But for the users it is not familiar. If something goes wrong - they suspect the service fault in this problem. They became scary. If designers want to avoid problems - they try to make inner processes (upload, search, update tec.) visible. We are going to talk about viability of a system in this article.

1) Show users what is his mistake. 
Make smart error notifications on every form that have mandatory fields.

Red color is for identification of critical problems.

If there are many fields - show which one is wrong and why is it wrong.

If you don't want make your customers scary - you may design the message in other colors.

Yellow is ok. This service added even small instruction for users who cannot login.

But do not do it like twitter because notifications must be visible. So, add some color accent in the message.

If error message consists some important information - we can show error window for users who want to know details.

2) Show success status.
Success messages are also important. Service must notify users that their action fulfilled and provide them further instructions.

3) Use wait to show that service work.
If the service do something more than 2 sec - add animated wait.

Some websites use this waiting for additional promotion.

4) Add process bar if the process is very long.

This one is too small.

I must be not in the bottom.

Make it visible. The bar has to be in the same place where was the upload button.

5) Use breadcrumbs if there are many pages and categories.
If the website has difficult structure - users can loose themselves. So they have to understand their status - where are they now. For this case designers have to create breadcrumbs.

6) Notify users if there is nothing to show.

Or there is no item to show.

Follow these tips and your users will never get lost.

Summary

1) Show users what is his mistake. 

2) Show success status.

3) Use wait to show that service work.

4) Add process bar if the process is very long.

5) Use breadcrumbs if there are many pages and categories.

6) Notify users if there is nothing to show.