As mentioned in JENKINS-26522 it is often useful to provide more information up-front than a simple red or green "this step passed" or "this step failed".

Adding notes/summarys to a stage would help to provide informations to the user without having to look into the detailed log.

In our case we share the testsystems between multiple builds but it's still useful to see on which physical server the tests have been run or what stage was executed on wich node or if certain actions have been taken (uploading a artifact to a special store or not).

All of those decisions are equally valid, lead to successful builds and can be looked up in the log - but they are much more useful to have in the stage-view-plugin (maybe blue ocean some day).

stage('my-stage') {
  if(decision) {
    // do this
    note ('Done this.')
  } else {
    // do that
    note ('Done that.')
  }
}

Maybe even a little markup is allowed to include small icons?