Does the user want a notification when an action is performed successfully?

Question

Is it good practice or not to give the user a notification of a successfully performed action? Like saving or deleting an item. Is it annoying and excessive or is it useful?

I am mostly referring to a toast notification, i.e. an auto-expiring notification

Answer 1

It is best to give some sort of feedback. The Netflix DVD Queue doesn't pop anything up, but it gives clear visual feedback that something has happened and that you can undo it.

Gmail provides an actual popup, but it's completely ignorable.

The problem with modal popup notifications is that stopping what you're doing in order to close notifications - that's what's "annoying and excessive."

So yes, provide feedback. And no, don't require users to close the notification.

Answer 2

Yes it is the best practice to show feedback messages on such actions... it means your system is having conversation with the user and the user is aware of what is happening, but don't annoy with too many alerts.

With a feedback cycle, you can tell the user what is going on in your application. However, keep in mind that the applications’s feedback should not be too annoying. Remember Microsoft’s Office Assistant “Clippy the paperclip” used in previous Microsoft Office versions giving you suggestions all the time? Feedback should have an additional benefit for the user and not distract him. With meaningless or too much feedback you will make the user experience worse – so use it wisely.

http://blog.mwaysolutions.com/2015/11/20/give-the-user-feedback-for-a-better-ux/

EDIT:

Answer 3

Based on the comment you made to Diego, your question is a lot different than what it looks at first sight.

If you require a lot of interaction, then don't offer a notification each time, and don't save each action immediately.

Instead, create sessions where the user can do any amount of actions (you can autosave every X amount of minutes). In these sessions, allow to undo everything, and for each action performed use a subtle animation/transition so the user understand something happened. This information transmitted by the transition should be enough to convey the message.

After the user is happy with the changes, offer to save the changes as in any other app, and then display a "your changes have been saved" message.

By doing this, you won't overwhelm your users, you'll keep then informed of their interactions and you'll have one and only one notice for what is a single process (content edition).

Taking the Gmail example by Ken Mohnkern : just imagine if every time you perform an action when creating an email (editing, deleting, changing fonts, etc) you get a message. You'd be alienated in no time. Instead, all those actions are just subsets of the main action: send a mail. Thus, you get the message only when you send a mail or create a draft, not every time you perform an action.

In short

Use messages sparingly, and always try to define what the main action is, paying special attention to destructive actions

Additional References

• Smart Transitions In User Experience Design
• The Importance of Context-Shifting in UX Patterns
• UI Animation and UX: A Not-So-Secret Friendship