10 ms·
I had a report in Microsoft Access that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it. I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake message
by benjohnson 9y ago
I had a report in Microsoft Access that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it.
I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Cross checking, Sorting" and other such nonsense.
The report now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse the "On Timer" event for it to work.
The users were delighted with the improvement.
- tyingq 9y agoVisual confirmation that it isn't hung, I'd be happy too.
- digi_owl 9y agoI am reminded of a webcomic, that i fail to locate at this moment, that reminded me of the practice of placing something next to a progress bar, like say during a Windows 95 install, to check if anything is actually happening.
- reificator 9y agoI do that whenever I have to wait on a progress bar. I zoom in with whatever accessibility options there are, then when a pixel is 3-5mm I put my mouse cursor at the end of the bar and wait.
- escherize 9y agoWow, I thought I was the only one.
- grkvlt 9y agoTo save time in the future, bear in mind any time you think you are the only person that does or notices something: you aren't. This is due to the fact that people are all running on the same physical architecture, with very similar cultural and social ecosystems, plus the law of large numbers. Note that this does not apply to edge cases such as people engaged in activities or domains with a very small number of participants...
- taneq 9y agoI don't use the zoom, but yeah, parking the cursor right at the progress bar to see if it's advanced is useful if only to amuse myself. :)
- tzahola 9y agoClassic!
- Larrikin 9y agoThis is the comic you're thinking of. http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/02/19/when-i-install-a-software/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/02/19/when-i-install-a-so... This was one of the comics that convinced me to add them to my RSS feed. I have not been disappointed since.
- slavik81 9y agoIt's a blank page that says "Loading..." Is that the joke...? edit: I started browsing around their site, and when I returned to that page via the back button, the actual comic was there.
- digi_owl 9y agoI removed them from same recently because I felt I could no longer relate to the jokes, or some such.
- sundvor 9y agoThat's so brilliant because it was true. (Nailed it, pixel perfect)
- ploxiln 9y agoYou're happy until 30 minutes later when the progress bar is still getting asymptotically closer to the end, and you come to suspect that the only thing that didn't crash was the progress bar.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago>when the progress bar is still getting asymptotically closer to the end That, my friend, is an impressive command of the English language. Thank you for teaching me the word asymptotically! [0] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/asymptotically http://www.dictionary.com/browse/asymptotically
- herbstein 9y agoI think most people that have done a CS degree would at least know the word. My cs101 class talked about asymptotic notation.
- sk5t 9y agoNot CS but any study of limits in math, perhaps with differential equations. And it’s a useful term generally, much more likely to come up in conversation than “subtrahend” or “mantissa” but not nearly as much as “tangent.”
- flyGuyOnTheSly 9y agoAnd that must be why I have yet to hear it, as I never took CS.
- tyingq 9y agoAt least it didn't say "orthagonal". Don't know why, but that word pops up here way too often.
- hutzlibu 9y agoCouldn't you have give also vague, but accurate information as well? User's like to know what's going on, even if they maybe don't understand all the details, but at least they see things are happening and not just a (fake) progress bar. So they can connect more to what is happening and therefore be more understanding and patient instead of just being told to wait, with no further information, which nobody likes.
- markcerqueira 9y ago> Couldn't you have give also vague, but accurate information as well? Could you give me an example of what you consider "vague, but accurate information?"
- TheCoreh 9y agoConnecting Fetching data Processing query Preparing for display
- girvo 9y agoMost of those steps will go immediately, and one of them has the same problem the original issue had: it’ll sit on it for ages...
- tomc1985 9y agoI designed and maintain a report-generating component and my system does the same thing. (Plus it is helpful as users can tell me where in the process it failed/hung) It doesn't matter how long each message sits on the screen, as long as it changes every so often. Animated, infinite progress bars also help if you don't/can't estimate ETA
- Retra 9y agoA cycling animation only tells you that your computer/UI isn't dead, it doesn't tell you that the underlying task isn't frozen.
- mrisoli 9y agoI remember reading long ago about how they did something similar at an airport(Dallas IIRC). Basically, people complained about baggage claim taking too long, so they just moved the baggage claim area to the other side of the airport, so it took longer for passengers to reach it, by the time they did, their bags would already be there, so the complaints stopped.
- Spivak 9y agoI feel like this really isn't deception but actually solving the problem which is that passengers didn't want to stand around.
- dingo_bat 9y agoExcept they had to spend the same amount of time walking. If presented as a choice I'd usually choose standing.
- zwily 9y agoNot me. Walking feels productive, standing is boring. Same with driving - my brain would rather feel like it’s making forward progress even if the route I take is longer.
- birdman3131 9y agoI have a cell phone to eliminate the standing is boring problem. (Before that it would have been a book)
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoIt's not like they tore up all of the parking/loading/unloading areas. They just moved the baggage claim to the farthest point along which everyone had to walk anyways.
- baddox 9y ago
- whowouldathunk 9y agoMissed opportunity for "reticulating splines"
- DonHopkins 9y agoThe tradition of "reticulating splines" started in Maxis games: http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines And now lots of other games and web sites do it too, even compiling Firefox: http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines/Usage_outside_of_Maxis_games http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines/Usage_outsid... The "Stage 5" evacuation completion detection timer in Austin Powers could have used a tad longer debouncing delay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YewcrxOQNvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YewcrxOQNvk
- bitwize 9y agoWriting tables to disk... Saving changes to template... Rebuilding index... https://youtu.be/Vd4fj9Efl4s https://youtu.be/Vd4fj9Efl4s
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoAges ago I evaluated some reporting software. We were using Crystal Reports at the time. One thing that CR did better than the others was make pages available as they were generated. This made the software feel faster even though it was slower than one or two of the others[0] at the time. [0] Can't remember which ones exactly.
- ams6110 9y agoJust had a little PTSD flashback moment there at seeing the words "Crystal Reports"
- sundvor 9y agoOh dear. That garbage came with Cold Fusion (before it became ColdFusion), IIRC.
- supergreg 9y agoWhich is why browsers take so seriously the time to first paint despite the efforts by javascript frameworks to push it back.
- starsinspace 9y agoFor interactive applications, reponsiveness trumps raw throughput. It's what made operating systems like AmigaOS and BeOS so fast: they didn't actually crunch numbers faster, but they always stayed responsive and quickly reacted to user input under any load, that made them feel faster.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoIn the same vein, at my work in the steel construction industry, when asked by internal and external customers how I'm going with their laser cut components I've taken to telling them: "Your job is important to us and has progressed in the queue". I can't always give an accurate response because our scheduling is constantly being derailed by urgent tasks and the not-so-urgent tasks get complete in between. People just want to know you haven't forgotten about them, throw in some light humour and a "I'll try to get it done before knock off tomorrow <wink wink>" and they tend to let me get back to working.
- JoshMnem 9y agoThat is one thing I dislike about sites that show no loading bar. On a slow connection it's impossible to tell if the page is still loading or already failed. It's also one of the irritating things about "Material Design" websites, where responses to clicks are artificially delayed before speeding out with unnatural acceleration. "Nothing is happening. JUST KIDDING!" I'm not sure if that is to mask the slowness of mobile devices or if it's the cause of them. It's the animation spam[1] of the current generation of UIs. * [1] "Let's make our website sparkle. It will be 'delightful'." http://dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex3/snow.htm http://dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex3/snow.htm
- ubernostrum 9y agoThat is one thing I dislike about sites that show no loading bar. On a slow connection it's impossible to tell if the page is still loading or already failed. Web browsers have progress bars. I think your complaint is with "sites" that just serve a JS payload and then load "the real site" entirely from requests made by JS. Turns out if you generate and serve actual HTML, you get a progress bar for free!
- vanillaboy 9y agoJS lets you easily implement bars that do reflect progress. Turn on the animation => start an async action (e.g. a database call) => end the animation. An error occured? Show the error. Here, simple and informative to the user - and much better than raw html.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 9y agoI don't know why every thread about Web applications needs someone to tell me that technically HTML was just designed to be a document format. OK, great, now it isn't just that.
- pletnes 9y ago
- oh_sigh 9y agoThis sounds like a Coding Horror story that is entirely made up. Using a timer made your code go from 5 to 8 minutes?
- benjohnson 9y agoWe had only 16 Megs of RAM. I think it had put chunks of the query process to virtual memory to deal with the 'on timer' stuff in the GUI process.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rayalez 9y agoSounds like a placebo button: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button They add fake "close doors" buttons to the elevators, that arent connected to anything, but make people feel they have agency and it makes waiting for doors to close less frustrating.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoErik Naggum reported that removing garbage collection messages from Emacs caused people to think it had been sped up: http://grokbase.com/t/perl/perl6-internals/00cmr2ak01/garbage-collector-slowness http://grokbase.com/t/perl/perl6-internals/00cmr2ak01/garbag...