I know it’s Wednesday in most parts of the world (and even Thursday some places), but I honestly could not get my Tuesday blog post out last night. Despite my best intentions, my house had a power outage due to some exploding transformers which forced me to push this post one day back. So I’m sorry for the lateness. Won’t happen again.
The power outage did manage to provide some material for the purpose of this post: feedback. A device requiring user input usually has a built-in mechanism for providing feedback — a means of communicating a message to the user. The message could be ‘hey user, the system has received your input’ (the buttons on an elevator); ‘hey user, give us a second we’re thinking about it’ (the hourglass icon in Windows or the progress bar in an web surfing application); or ‘hey you screwed up’ (when you get returned to the same page after entering an incorrect password). With many means of displaying feedback to the user, some elegant (and not so elegant) designs have emerged.
Feedback can be informative, or can be utterly confusing. After the power was restored, of course all the devices in the house had blinking displays reading the imcorrect times (a method of feedback: blinking = incorrect time setting). As I went to the microwave to reheat some chicken nuggets for lunch, the screen which normally displays the time was unlike the other time-pieces in the house. It now displayed a cryptic two letter message:
PF. What did that mean? Please fix, promptly find, post-functional, parliament funkadelic? Provide feedback? Oh and the microwave worked fine: I cooked my chicken nuggets and the message disappeared afterwards, which further deepened the mystery. And I still had no idea what was wrong with the microwave or how to fix it. Bottom line – clear feedback: good for the system, good for the user
