Reply to fxn Regarding User Was Successfully Created

fxn writes in his Advogato blog about the fact that many web apps confirm that a user was successfully created:

Why so many webapps confirm to the user that some action was successfully done? Of course it was!

Look at your desktop applications, your editor does not bug you saying "File saved!" constantly, iCal is indeed almost completely silent. You warn the user when the disk has run out of space, right?

I think those messages come from the insecurity the developer feels about the amount of failure points between request and response. Perhaps some are just repeating the pattern seen elsewhere. But that's not the user's business, you warn when you fail.

I disagree with this. The web is a different user-interface medium than desktop applications where different rules apply. If you don't give confirmation on the web for successful actions, the user will wonder if they were successful or not. So you do need to do so.

For example when submitting this form, I am brought back to the same form page. So I don't know whether it was successful or not or if it got sent at all.

So a web application writer needs to write a confirmation that many successful operations took place, and to error if there was a problem.

Syndicated 2008-10-11 13:53:56 from shlomif