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Progress bars are great when they convey meaningful information... sometimes it's nice to know if you have time to grab a coffee, or actually eat lunch. In my
by canadian_tired 6y ago
Progress bars are great when they convey meaningful information... sometimes it's nice to know if you have time to grab a coffee, or actually eat lunch. In my experience (when having to supply said bars) is that they serve primarily to tell the hapless user that things are still happening. In other words, the actual number is not important...what is important is real feedback that things are still happening and it's worth waiting. Or things are b0rked and you should start over. I don't care about a real time or % progress bar...just something that honestly (to OP's point) lets me know that things aren't screwed.
Edit: typos
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago> In other words, the actual number is not important...what is important is real feedback that things are still happening and it's worth waiting. And the inverse is that when progress bars are fake, they tell the user that everything is working even when it's not! I MitM my SSL traffic. This causes Figma to fail to load documents in the most annoying way possible—it shows a progress bar that never stops moving, but becomes increasingly slow as it nears the end. I suspect the bar is programmed to never increase by more than half the remaining distance, or something like that. After half an hour, I finally realized something had to be wrong, and I tried whitelisting figma.com in my proxy. The document loaded immediately. If Figma hadn't lied to me with a fake progress bar, it would have saved so much time...
- saagarjha 6y agoI've gotten real good at recognizing those kinds of progress bars; I think Window Explorer's search had one and it trained me to never trust them.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y agoI recently found out that you can prepend your search with "name:" and windows search will only match against filenames which is the behavior most users expect by default and much faster than whatever nonsense windows explorer search normally does. Example: name:search-term
- vulcan01 6y agoWindows Explorer, IIRC (I don't use Windows anymore), searches the content and title of most(?) files.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoIt's not just search when the progress bar appears, though. Also when trying to enumerate contents of a folder - e.g. when you're accessing a networked resource, or one that may not be viewable with your privileges. You then get this bullshit progress bar that speeds through the first 3/4, and asymptotically approaches 100%.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoVSCode has a progress bar (well a throbber) that shows up when the language server has waited long enough that the UI should show some activity. But for my workflows it only shows up when something has gone wrong. So when I see it, it’s a good indicator to either restart TS server or reload the whole window. Not a great experience or solution!
- ASalazarMX 6y ago> I don't care about a real time or % progress bar...just something that honestly (to OP's point) let's me know that things aren't screwed. That's where "marquee" progress bars fit in. Those poor abominations that, like Sisyphus, progress without advancing, because a simple activity indicator wasn't user-friendly enough.
- ygra 6y agoEspecially fun in Web UIs where the callback that would remove the spinner will never be called because some error occurred somewhere in between and is only logged in the console where no normal user will ever see it ... Personally I feel that to be very much a subversion of the »things are still moving, so stuff is still happening« assumption that has been common in normal desktop applications.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y agoThe app I work on is plagued with this issue. I just wish I was given the time to go around and fix it everywhere. As with so many of the issues in web apps, its not even complex or hard to fix these issues. Its just no one cares enough to schedule time for it.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoYou are a hero. And to the extent you’re unsung, I will sing your praises.
- ASalazarMX 6y agoMy ideal spinner would be a decreasing arch, telling the user how much time remains until their request timeouts and fails. Uses the same space as a spinner, but conveys more information.
- GordonS 6y agoMaybe spinners like these need a kind of "dead man's switch", where something needs to keep telling them "yep, still working" every so often, otherwise an error is shown?
- dkersten 6y ago> the actual number is not important...what is important is real feedback that things are still happening Absolutely agree, but then, don't make it a percentage progress bar. Make it one of those "amount unknown" bars, or better yet, a spinner or game-like loading screen. Something with movement that tells me things are happening. Don't pretend to know "how done" it is if you don't know.