The need for user feedback
I ride the bus everyday in order to get anywhere. One of the benefits/problems of living in the big city without a car. Every once in a while, on older buses where they don’t have the little sign that lights up, when you go to pull the cord that signals the driver that you want to get off at the next stop nothing happens. There is no little chime or ding. So, you pull the cord again, still nothing. The third time you pull the cord even harder and still nothing. No chime, no ding, no sounds at all. No indication that the driver knows about your request. The next thing that people do is they go up to driver and verbally make their request known. I have seen people get quite confused and upset all because that little ding is missing.
In software, whether it is a desktop app or a web app, it is amazing how many times as a user I try to do something and get absolutely no feedback. I try to do something in the program and it just sits there or the screen refreshes, but the program does not signal in any way that it either recognized my request or carried it out. Sometimes I can tell by some piece of data on the screen that has changed or the screen that I am looking has changed in some small way, but ultimately this is not enough to explicitly tell me that my request was carried out successfully. As software developers, we need to be giving constant feedback to our users about what our programs are doing. Otherwise they will get confused, try the operation again, or simply give up on the program entirely.
Two companies that have this idea of giving feedback to the user are “Google with gmail”:http://www.37signals.com/ and “37 Signals”:http://www.37signals.com/. Almost every operation that you try and do, the apps give you a little message at the top telling you that your request was successful. These are two companies that definitely understand usability and what it takes to make top quality apps that people can use.
Proper user feedback is one of the most important aspects of usability and it is very interesting to watch how people react when it is not there. Just like on the bus, users get confused, worried and then scared that their request is not being fulfilled and the software is not behaving the way they expect. Unfortunately, software does not come with a driver you can talk to.