Visual Feedback

So far the discussion has been focused on making features visible. For complete visibility, a program needs to provide visual feedback to indicate to the user that a task is being done either correctly or incorrectly. Visual feedback is very important for direct manipulation to indicate that an object has been changed. Any task that a program does automatically should have some visual indication. For example, when Word saves a file automatically, a floppy disk icon appears on the taskbar. All time-consuming operations also need feedback. Make sure there is a wait cursor, progress meter, or some other visual feedback for all operations that take more than a second to complete. It is important to give the user a clue that the program will be unresponsive while a command is being performed. The previous list of visual interfaces gave several examples of visual feedback. Feedback is discussed in more detail in Chapter 12.