Has it been a week already? Yikes!

Throughout About Face, Cooper makes uses of the phrase “rich, modeless feedback” to describe passive communication of information without requiring navigation through an interface.

For example, in Microsoft Word:

At a glance you know your place in the document, how many pages there are, etc. Simple and effective.

iTunes takes this to a whole new level:

Good grief! Look at all this juicyness!

At a glance, I know:

• I’m busy downloading something.
• I’m busy downloading ‘1′ something. What it is isn’t really important, since I initiated the download, I know what it is. This level of granularity suffices. Although perhaps a % indicator would be more useful.
• My “Grey Nano” is charging.
• My “Grey Nano” is syncing.
• I have the ability to eject the “Grey Nano”.

All of this is done within about a square inch of screen real estate (depending on your resolution) and without requiring any special navigation.

Phenomenal.

Not all information should be presented at this level. For example, word and characters counts are not readily available in Microsoft Word, instead requiring navigation to the Tools | Word Count pull-down menu:

Deciding which goes where requires insight into your users and their goals (of course!)

The mistake many developers and designers make is forgetting the difference between data and information, and spamming users with everything but the kitchen sink…

Which is effectively nothing.  Get this right!