Really loved how this animation turned out.
I was in a meeting with backend, going through the list of statuses they'd built for a platform that helps users manage their mailing lists. My job was to review which of those states actually belonged in front of a user, and which ones were backend's business alone.
It's quite different from what I'm used to in FinTech where a pill usually tells you if the money moved. Here, the pill had to tell you if the message moved, and whether anyone on the other end even wanted it.
We narrowed it down to five states a user needed to see. Draft, for campaigns started but not yet committed to. Programmed, for the ones scheduled with a defined date. Sent, for what's already dispatched. Bounced, for handoff failures, whether from an invalid domain or a temporary throttle. Spam, for anything reported or sent straight to junk.
The color had to carry more than the label did. Bounced isn't a failure the user caused, so it couldn't read as alarming as Spam, which is more like a verdict on the message itself. Getting that distinction wrong meant a user either panicking over something recoverable or shrugging off something that should've worried them.
Still deciding whether "Programmed" should just be "Scheduled", since it's the more honest word for what's actually happening.
I'm realizing how much these pills decide, on the user’s behalf, how alarmed they should be.