The power of rich visual modeless feedback

Nick Meyers of Cooper, describes numerous examples of rich visual modeless feedback.

Alerting is another behavior in interface design where RVMF can be effectively used. Often, alerts such as errors may occur in other tabs, but can still be communicated to users where they are given the choice of breaking their workflow or ignoring the alert until later.

RVMF is most effective at presenting changes in status, progress, or displaying errors.

Use the same visual design principles when considering RVMF as with other forms of interface design:

• Use visual hierarchy to insure that the critical RVMF data stands out on the screen
• Use more than just color as a vector to represent RVMF
• Use color consistently and meaningfully to represent status and create a learnable color system (the Yahoo! Finance example utilizes commonly accepted color codes to represent direction)
• Use animation consciously and sparingly

RVMF is a great technique to be used in interface design, but it’s not generally appropriate for experiences that target beginners. Some standard design patterns, such as progress bars, are generally well-known and understood but custom controls always require some decoding by users at first.