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On a typical application when a user submits a form, it's good practice to provide a success message that the information has been submitted and saved.

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This makes sense for an application that handles the submission and saving of data all on its own.

The application I am working with has a form that submits information, and sends it along to another, partner application. The second application does the saving of information in batches once a day. This makes immediate feedback on success not possible.

What would be appropriate feedback to provide a user that their information has been sent (but whether it has been saved or not is yet to be determined)?

I was considering using an info message like the one below:

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  • Submit or sent makes no difference to me. I want to know if I was approved or not.
    – paparazzo
    Commented Aug 17, 2014 at 21:52

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Just say what is going to happen. (nielsen heurestic #1 - system status)

"your info has been sent" is obvious and not actionable though.

I'd like to hear what you actually said happens - "saving ... in batches once a day". That's a good start.

If you have a confirmation of a successful queueing from the parent app - use that (ie blaim the parent app's developer).

Other thing the message should convey is what/if action is needed, that the queueing is not an error nor exception. (nielsen heurestic #9 - errors).

Color coding (green/blue) may be too little in this case. Depends on the actual sequence of actions and exact wording though.

Also state if the final outcome will be communicated later and/or via another (which) channel or how to verify the query status - depends if the process has such a loop or is a "fire&forget" submit.

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  • Neither telling about saving in batches nor blaming developer of parent app will help, if the user does not deal with the parent app (e.g. in case of front-end web application sending data to ERP). Users usually are get worried about complexity of the process when they read such messages. More reasonable will be to take care of this complexity and simply tell the user that "information will be processed in X hours" (placeholder for parent app SLA). The most important thing will be to indicate that submission actually did happen and user will be able to get status update.
    – Ivan Gammel
    Commented Aug 18, 2014 at 10:02
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    meant blaming it internally, not complain to the user - it's the same with your SLA, you promise something you can't influence really.
    – rogerovo
    Commented Aug 18, 2014 at 13:07

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