---
title: presence-signals
summary: Showing that another person is here, half here, or gone in a real-time product — an arrival that fills a ring, partial attention as a dashed outline, a leaving beat, live typing that resizes its bubble, reactions pinned where they were tapped in relative coordinates, shared activities that pause when one person leaves, and one colour per person everywhere. From Benji Taylor's Honk.
tags: [components, presence, real-time, collaboration, chat, multiplayer]
---

# Presence signals

Most real-time products show presence as one green dot and a "typing…" line. Honk made presence the axis every feature was designed around, and the patterns transfer to any shared surface: chat, docs, canvases, live games.

## States, each with its own signal

| State | Signal | Honk's version |
|---|---|---|
| Arriving | A transition with a moment to it, not a dot switching colour | A ring around the friend's avatar fills, with a sound ([[sound-motion-sync]]) |
| Fully here | Live activity, not a label | Every character appears on the other screen as it is typed, typos and edits included |
| Half here | A weaker version of "here", not "away" | The avatar becomes a dashed outline while the friend looks elsewhere in the app |
| Leaving | A short goodbye beat, then gone | A brief burst of waving emoji (in the user's skin tone) with a sound |

Three states read better than two. "Here but looking elsewhere" is the one most products drop, and it is the one that explains a slow reply.

## Rules

- **Activity resizes its container live.** The typing bubble grows as you type and shrinks back when you pause; when both people type at once the screen splits 50/50. The layout tells the conversation's rhythm.
- **A reaction is pinned to what it reacts to.** A double tap drops the heart exactly where the finger landed, with a faint ring and a haptic both people feel. Store the position in relative coordinates (10% x, 20% y), so it lands on the same spot across screen sizes.
- **Shared activities need everyone present.** A real-time game pauses when one player leaves; it does not play on against an empty seat.
- **A notification shows its own lifetime.** An in-app banner whose border counts down how long it will stay tells the user how urgent it is and when it will go.
- **One colour per person, everywhere:** cursor, selection, avatar ring, name label. A collaborator recoloured between surfaces reads as two people.
- **Colour carries meaning outside the content too.** Honk turned a tray's background red for destructive actions such as deleting an account ([[destructive-actions]]).
- **Real-time products earn their pauses.** Outside the live chat, Honk added friction on purpose: a slot-machine reveal for finding people, a signature before chatting with strangers that measurably reduced bad behaviour. Immediacy reads as immediacy only next to something slower.

## Accessibility

Every presence change that matters (someone joined, someone left, a reaction landed) is also announced in a live region ([[screen-reader-announcements]]); a ring filling is invisible to a screen reader. Dashed versus solid needs a second cue (a label or tooltip) for anyone who cannot tell them apart.

## When to apply

Designing chat, multiplayer docs and canvases, live cursors, shared games, or any surface where two people are in it at once. In a faux-UI demo of collaboration, each person keeps one colour and their name rides their cursor ([[MOC-faux-ui]]).

## Gotcha

Presence animation is frequent. An arrival ring with sound is a delight once an hour and noise in a busy channel; scale the signal down as frequency goes up ([[delight-impact-curve]]), and never fire it for your own presence.

## Sources

- Benji Taylor, *Honkish*, [benji.org/honkish](https://benji.org/honkish) (read 2026-11-01): presence, reactions, mini games, in-app notifications, tray colours, friction moments. Paraphrased.
- Related: [[interaction-personality]], [[avatar-systems]], [[optimistic-updates]].