In Unix, the correct procedure is to be quiet when your process successfully works.
In modern Graphical User Interfaces, the Unix standard does not apply.
We're piloting and releasing updates almost daily for a new application for internal users at work.
I just released a UI update that gives no feedback when the user clicks an interface much like a hyperlink that indicates a remote process should be started. We have not specified yet what the feedback should be if any, but I'm thinking we should have something along the lines of an "action requested" pop-up, otherwise we're likely to have users repeatedly clicking the link and looking for an indication that the action has started (which might take minutes to appear).
After the action has started and before it either fails or successfully completes, we show that the action is "in flight." I want to propose an elegant and satisfying solution, but I am not sure I can model this on anything else we're doing at the moment. I'm thinking maybe the best solution is to look for it in the action queue and describe the action as "in queue", but that will take a bit more programming.
What is an elegant solution to this problem?
