Imagine performing a task on an interface and not getting feedback on whether you’re doing things correctly. The lack of feedback would make you feel uncertain and apprehensive about your actions. That’s why it’s important to inform users of interface states as they occur in context. The best way to do this is to use toasts.
Toasts can get the user’s attention and get out of their way quickly without disrupting their task. The way they do this is through motion animation.
A research study has discovered that motion animation captures visual attention quite effectively. Evolution has designed humans to detect the movement of predators and prey in their visual field for survival. As such, when toasts slide on the screen, users won’t miss it.
Toasts also don’t remain on the screen to continue distracting users after they read it. Instead, they slide-in as quickly as they slide-out. As a result, users won’t have any persistent status messages that are no longer relevant after the context changes.
The momentary behavior of toasts also prevents confusion when multiple states occur. Users wouldn’t want status messages to stack on top of each other without knowing which one is relevant to their current context.
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