A brief, auto-dismissing notification that appears at the edge of the screen to confirm an action or communicate a status update without interrupting the user's current workflow. Toasts are suited for non-critical, informational feedback — they should never carry information the user needs to act on before dismissal.
Common contexts
- Confirming a file save with a brief 'Changes saved' toast that disappears after three seconds
- Notifying a user that a background export is complete while they continue working on another task
- Replacing an interruptive modal confirmation with a dismissible toast for a low-stakes undo scenario
Use when
Use a toast when the feedback is purely confirmatory and the user does not need to take any action — 'your message was sent' is a perfect toast candidate. Pair it with an undo action link if the operation can be reversed within a short window, which significantly reduces anxiety around irreversible-feeling actions.
Avoid when
Never put error messages that require user action inside a toast — if someone needs to read, understand, and respond to a message before it disappears, the auto-dismiss will guarantee they miss it. The cost is a failed task and a user who doesn't know why.
The most common toast mistake is using it to communicate errors that the team doesn't want to interrupt the user with — the desire to be unobtrusive is reasonable, but a dismissing error message that the user never reads is functionally the same as no error message at all.
Real-world examples
- Slack's 'Message sent' toast appears for 3 seconds before auto-dismissing — deliberately short, because NNg research shows toasts that persist more than 4 seconds are treated as errors rather than confirmations.
- Figma uses a toast to confirm 'Link copied to clipboard' with an undo option that prevents users from overwriting their clipboard by accident — a toast pattern that replaces a disruptive confirmation modal.
- Google Workspace's 'Changes saved' toast is the reason millions of users trust Drive's auto-save without hitting Cmd+S compulsively — the toast provides just enough confirmation to change a 30-year muscle-memory behaviour.