Designing an honest status screen: four states, including 'we lost the signal'

Most status screens have two states: good and bad. That binary is why people stop looking at them. Real systems spend a lot of time in a third state — I do not know — and a UI that cannot say that will lie instead.

The four states we ship

1. Moving — something in the room is changing.
2. Still, present — the room's signature is stable but not the empty baseline.
3. No one — matches the empty-room baseline.
4. No signal — the sensor is not reporting.

Two of those four are boring, one is the one families care about, and one exists purely so the other three can be trusted. State 4 gets its own colour, its own icon, and a visible "last seen" age. It is not an error toast you can dismiss, because a dismissed error is indistinguishable from good news.

Why we refuse to compress to green/red

Green/red forces you to collapse "no one is home" and "the sensor died" into the same pixel. One is normal, the other needs a phone call. Colour is a terrible place to hide that distinction.

We also deliberately do not animate a "pulse" or a heartbeat motif. Anything that looks like a vital sign invites the reader to assume vital-sign accuracy, and we would then be answering questions we cannot answer.

Alarm fatigue is the actual enemy

Every feature request in this category is "notify me when X". Each added notification makes the next one less likely to be read. We kept notifications out of the product entirely for the first version: the dashboard shows state, and if you want to look, you look. That is a worse demo and a better product.

The tradeoff is explicit and we say it out loud to customers: this shows you, it does not alert you. If you need someone woken up at 3am, this is not that device.

Physical limits belong on the screen

Wi-Fi sensing degrades with distance and walls, so the UI states the working envelope instead of hiding it: same room up to about 10 metres, through one ordinary interior wall about 5 metres. Outside that, "no signal" appears — which is honest, and also tells you where to move the node. A user who understands the envelope stops trusting the display in the wrong room, which is exactly what you want.

A small test we use for any status UI

Ask: if the data source died right now, what would this screen say? If the answer is anything other than "I lost the signal", the design is not finished.

Live dashboard (a real device in a real apartment, updating about once per second): https://annest.cn/live/

AnNest is a consumer safety display, not a medical device. It does not detect falls, does not measure vitals, and does not call for help. If something is an emergency, call your local emergency number.