Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Directing User Attention

When people get confused by large state changes, they usually react by asking themselves what just happened. When they miss small state changes, their reaction is typically along the lines of “Did I just do something, or not? Did it take?”

Here’s something you’ve probably experienced. You click a link to download a file, and nothing happens. So, you click again. Still nothing. It isn’t until you’ve clicked a few more times that you notice that you’ve downloaded the same file half a dozen times; the computer just didn’t tell you about it:

You can solve problems of this type by animating the state change, with the goal being ...