Asynchronous update design/interaction patterns

Posted by Andy Waite on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Andy Waite
Published on 2012-06-18T23:46:47Z Indexed on 2012/06/19 3:23 UTC
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These days many apps support asynchronous updates. For example, if you're looking at a list of widgets and you delete one of them then rather than wait for the roundtrip to the server, the app can hide the one you deleted, giving immediate feedback. The actual deletion on the server will happen in the background. This can be seen in web apps, desktop apps, iOS apps, etc.

But what about when the background operation fails. How should you feed back to the user? Should you restore the UI to the pre-deletion state? What about when multiple background operations fail together?

Does this behaviour/pattern have a name? Perhaps something based on the Command pattern?

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