Something in the system has changed — because of what the actor just did, what they typed, or an event elsewhere — and the change has to reach them without costing more attention than it is worth. Status feedback is that calibration: not one move but a framework for choosing among them.
Three dimensions place any status message:
- Initiation. Whether the change came from the actor’s action, from their input, or from the system on its own. This determines where the actor is already looking — and so how far the message must travel to reach them.
- Action required. Whether the actor must respond or only know. This determines persistence: feedback that demands a response must outlive a glance, while feedback that only confirms may evaporate.
- Urgency. How soon the actor must know. This determines how far toward interruption the delivery is allowed to escalate.
The dimensions route to three delivery shapes.
Indication
State worn by the element itself: typographic emphasis, colour, an icon, a badge, an animation — placed on or beside the thing whose state changed, readable in passing.
Validation
The system’s response to the actor’s own input: it arrives at the field where the input happened, says what is wrong and how to fix it, and persists until corrected. The validation pattern owns the move — its timing contract, message shape, and persistence rule.
Notification
Events pushed to the actor, including ones they didn’t cause and aren’t watching for. The notification pattern owns the routing: its decision tree sends glance-sized messages to transient feedback and escalates action-carrying ones to callouts and dialogs.
Related components
- Callout — inline delivery mechanism for status feedback
- Toast — delivery mechanism for transient feedback
- Badge — indication mechanism worn by the element itself
- …
Resources & references
Related patterns
Enables
- Collaboration — Status feedback provides awareness of system state and action effects in collaborative environments
Enacts
- Temporality — the timing and latency with which the system reports a change back to the actor
Complements
- Form — validation and system status during and after entry.
- Inline interface — system and progress signals during inline work.
- Wizard — communicates progress and validation state throughout the wizard
Tangentially related
- Commenting — indicates comment and resolution states
Related
- Data entry — confirming the interpretation of forgiving input.
- Deletion — Communicating deletion results
- Help — Communicates system state; the "Recover" purpose often begins with status feedback.
- Notification — status feedback for events the actor didn't trigger and isn't watching; pushed, not pulled
- Prose
- Activity log — Records status changes as Events for chronological review
- Undo — provides immediate feedback on the undo action
Preceded by
- Settings — confirms settings changes and communicates their application
Instantiated by
- Transient feedback — the pushed, self-dismissing delivery shape of status feedback
- Validation — the persistent, correction-demanding delivery shape of status feedback