Place, time, and meaning

Some feedback is vitally important, like the warning that you're about to delete…your entire music collection, or transfer all of your money out of your bank…account, but most feedback is casually informative.…It's simply keeping us aware of our place, and time, our progress, and helping us…understand our context.…We previously discussed effective navigation, and many of the techniques we…described are based on delivering relevant and timely feedback to help…establish a sense of place.…One important, but often overlooked aspect of feedback for navigation are the…active, hover, visited, down, and disabled states.…

These quickly and efficiently communicate both the opportunity for interaction,…as well as confirmation of the action.…The active state is the appearance of a link, button, tab, or icon before we…interact with it; its appearance must communicate the opportunity to interact.…The hover state changes appearance when we approach the element.…The down state acknowledges that our click or tap was received.…