I use Pidgin® on Windows® to join multiple chat and instant message accounts into one display on my office computers. I often forget to log out when I leave my office for the day. For most of my accounts, I can be logged in on more than one computer at a time, but not for my Novell® GroupWise® Instant Messenger (GWIM) account. Whenever I log on to GWIM somewhere, I am automatically logged off from any other computer. This includes when I log on at home later in the evening.

One morning not long ago I was working in my office and wanted to send a message to a colleague that I had been chatting with the previous afternoon through my GWIM account. The Pidgin messaging window from that chat was still open from the previous day. Figure 1 is an example of what that window looked like (though I changed the name to Someone). I was disappointed to see that the “buddy” was listed as offline. It wasn’t for a couple of hours (when I restored the main Pidgin window to send a message to someone else) that I realized that the buddy was not offline— I was one who was offline! I had logged in from home the previous evening and had not logged in again at my office in the morning. Because my status was shown on the main window, which was hidden by another application at the time, I had no idea who was really offline.

Figure 2 is a screen shot of the Pidgin chat window when a buddy really is offline. Notice that the only difference between Figures 1 and 2 is the parentheses around the name in the title bar. Wow! I had never even noticed that until I tried to find some hint in the GUI that could have saved me from my mistake. (Am I the only one who didn’t catch this subtlety before?)

I was surprised and disappointed by this poor design. It would be very easy to make it clear why this chat window is not active; instead the poor user is mislead by a very unhelpful status.

I was surprised and disappointed by this poor design. It would be very easy to make it clear why this chat window is not active; instead the poor user is mislead by a very unhelpful status.

KEY DESIGN POINT

If you’re showing status of any type, make sure that it is not misleading. No icon or status text should be used for multiple situations, unless something additional makes the variation very clear.