There are (fortunately!) many examples of modeless feedback these days, and I’d like to take an opportunity to briefly highlight two of them.

THE GOOD

Amazon.com’s new modeless indicator of shopping cart content!  The button you click to access your cart changes to reflect the number of items you’ve added.

Note the placement of the number ‘inside’ the cart.  Terrific.

The icing on the cake: a mouseover displaying the contents of your cart!

If anyone is interested, that D3X is on my wish list, so feel free ;-)

THE BAD

Well, bad modeless feedback is akin to bad pizza – it’s tough to get it so wrong as to be detrimental.  Hey, at least it’s modeless :-)

THE ?

Ever notice that Gmail will display the name of the next off-screen responder in your conversation?  It’s here:

And a close up:

Is it the next off-screen person in the conversation?  Or the next person that isn’t me?  It’s puzzling enough that I’ve never bothered to understand its utility, though scrolling through a long conversation, it’s a bit distracting to see the color and value change frequently.

What exactly does it mean and how would it change my behaviour?  Would the contents of this mouseover ever prompt me to scroll or stop scrolling?

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