16 ms·

Gmail’s fake loading indicator (2020)

194 points by goranmoomin 5y ago

planb 5y ago
Progress bars are hard. You could try to come up with something that guesses the user's connection speed from the first few bytes, somehow checks what's already in the cache and you will still have an inaccurate progress bar. Probably even one that isn't fullly filled up before the page is ready.
arduinomancer 5y ago
It’s not worth the extra complexity for something that loads that fast. As a user why would I even care about a real loading bar here? I just care whether the page loads or not.
PikachuEXE 5y ago
After switching to Thunderbird I can never go back to Gmail. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ For really important mails I use ProtonMail.
- CyberShadow 5y ago
  Perhaps odd, but I've had the opposite experience. I switched to Thunderbird at the same time I switched to Linux; after some tweaking, I was mostly happy with it. Then, in some major version, it started frequently freezing up for thirty seconds at a time. Authoring emails in it became impossible. I could not downgrade it because it was version-locked with some system libraries (libnss OSLT). I could not debug it because that was blocked by a bug filed on Bugzilla ten years ago with no fixes or workarounds. Then, in another major version, they killed XUL extensions. I still hope to stop depending on Google services some day, but at that point I would probably switch to or write some webmail with a similar-enough UI to Gmail.
  - HeadlessChild 5y ago
    Thunderbird has been PITA due to its major updates that breaks existing add-on's which I tend to use.
  - jamienicol 5y ago
    To be fair though, the freeze was probably caused by a xul extension. I switched from Gmail to fastmail last week, after planning to do so "one day" for a few years. Using a mixture of the web client and Thunderbird, just like I did when using Gmail. No regrets so far, I recommend taking to leap!
    - CyberShadow 5y ago
      > To be fair though, the freeze was probably caused by a xul extension. No, it's still there even in the most recent version. (Maybe I just have too much mail?)
- LordAtlas 5y ago
  I used to use Thunderbird. But Gmail's spam filtering capability combined with their search are something I missed. Unless something has changed in the past 3-4 years.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    To make things a bit clearer: Thunderbird is a email client, but doesn't actually hosts emails. Gmail is both a email client, and you can host your email with them. But that doesn't mean you have to use Gmail "The Client" to access Gmail "The Emails". So in short, you can use Thunderbird as a client with your @gmail.com address, so you still have the same spam filter and search, but a lighter and faster UI.
sk5t 5y ago
Of course there is an xkcd for the long history of terrible loading-progress bars: https://xkcd.com/612/ https://xkcd.com/612/
cab404 5y ago
I knew that Google is evil, but that's whole another level.
drawqrtz 5y ago
I feel like this is the case for soo mamy loading bars. Especially with games. Loading bar zips to 99% and then you wait for a few minutes. Yea right. I guess it is really hard not to make it frustrating.
louissan 5y ago
They should add a "dislike" button for this, me thinks 8o)
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rektide 5y ago
gmails application architecture has most decidedly not scaled to the bigger application it is today. once a rare gem of a just in time loading app, now it's just so so so so so so slow. unloved & destitute.
dijit 5y ago
Honestly though: the idea of loading 20MiB of JS to read a 24KiB message is weird. Like: I get it, traditional mail clients kinda suck, they feel bloated and janky. But the more I think of it, the more I think that webmail was a mistake, especially webmail as heavy as GMail has become.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  > Honestly though: the idea of loading 20MiB of JS to read a 24KiB message is weird. What about downloading 70 MB of compressed binary code for Thunderbird? > Like: I get it, traditional mail clients kinda suck, they feel bloated and janky. But the more I think of it, the more I think that webmail was a mistake, especially webmail as heavy as GMail has become. I don't see how does it differ from traditional e-mail clients, except that you don't have to install, configure and allow unlimited access to your computer.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    It differs very greatly from traditional desktop mailers in that the search on gmail is fast (because it brings thousands of machines to bear on your request for an instant) and the search in desktop apps takes forever (because your little computer no matter how beefy does not have a million cores).
    - still_grokking 5y ago
      I have a few GB of mail folders. I can search them more or less instantaneous, using Kontact (KMail). Full-text indexing isn't dark magic at all.
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        I guess we have different requirements of scale. My gmail is over 300GB (one of the reasons I have a Google 1 subscription).
        5y ago
bserge 5y ago
Yeah, their spam filter is also fake. You "report as spam", at least on Android. So it's up to Google to decide if it's actually spam.
rbrbr 5y ago
I figured that out over a year ago. One of many fakes from Google.
Ndymium 5y ago
I remember Internet Explorer also doing this back in the day. When I was a kid I assumed it was showing correct progress, and I'd be patiently waiting for no payoff. Only much later I learned it meant nothing, it was just showing it wasn't dead. I'm not sure about GMail's case, but I recall Mac OS X (back when it was called that) used to do something like this. Since showing a correct progress bar doesn't make it look so nice (it might be stuck at 90% for longer than it took to get there) and might be difficult to estimate, they instead wrote the last boot time into a file and on the next boot would render a smooth progress bar that would follow the timer. In my experience it made for a reasonable estimation of the boot time and I thought it was a clever solution.
- drawqrtz 5y ago
  What a clever solution! I like it because it still f gives an realistic indication of how long it will take!
  - editkid 5y ago
    Yeah, that's clever indeed.
- jgtrosh 5y ago
  Jenkins also does that (estimate progress based on last duration), but also shows estimated status equal to the previous one. If you know what it means, you know what state you're trying to fix or maintain, but it is quite confusing at first.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Remember how the original Mac used to plop down icons of all your system extensions one-by-one along the bottom of the screen, in the order that it loaded them, which helped you know how long it would take to boot, and figure out which one crashed your system? And how all the k001 k1dz had lots and lots of extensions? Well there was actually a special extension that made you even k001er: you could paste as many and whatever icons you desired into its resource fork, and it would plop them down one by one during the boot, delaying a bit between each. Sure it took a little longer to boot, but it made you such a bad-ass!
Mizza 5y ago
They all are.
- jacobsimon 5y ago
  Surprised this isn’t higher. Loading bars are universally faked on the web.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    My favorite was writing.com - I don't know if it's still like this, but there was a period where they put a javascript loading spinner on the page by hiding the already-on-the-page content, let it spin for a moment, then showed the content.
    - dhosek 5y ago
      There are a lot of sites that have fake delays to load information to make it seem like they're doing more work than they actually are.
chrisMyzel 5y ago
Youtube & Netflix do this the same way…actually a lot of JS/TS frontend frameworks nowadays have this 1px loading bar at the top which behaves the same way (speedup, slow down never reach 100%)
- welder 5y ago
  I think loading indicators fall into two categories: 1. full page 2. unobtrusive Those 1px progress bars are unobtrusive because you can partially render data you've already received while still conveying that more data is loading. To make a JS progress bar correctly show precent of data loaded over a network you would need to first know the total data size. That's why JS progress bars are always auto-incrementing and don't represent actual loading progress.
  - chrisMyzel 5y ago
    > To make a JS progress bar correctly show precent of data loaded over a network you would need to first know the total data size. correct but what's the problem with determining it server-side
jeffbee 5y ago
They basically borrowed this from the MacOS X booting progress bar, which is also 1000% fake. Still, this progress animation does serve a purpose. Normally it is prompt, but if you see it at all it means that Gmail is behind the scenes trying to make your account work correctly. So in that sense it serves as a kind of binary indicator.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
I find this author's semi-outrage amusing. Oh, what a world of deception your virgin senses have yet to comprehend. The deceptive loading bar has a loooong history through a solid two decades of early MacOS and Windows. I honestly think the early status bars are the subconscious inspriation for the software estimation joke about the first 90% of code takes the first 90% of budget, the last 10& take the other 90%
DonHopkins 5y ago
Percent Done Progress Indicators 1985 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnzaS18XuJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnzaS18XuJ4 >Brad Myers >This video reports on early research about progress bars. It was previously published as: Brad A. Myers. Percent-Done Progress Indicators in Practice and Experiments, Videotape shown at SIGCHI '85. San Francisco, CA. Apr. 14-18, 1985. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 19, no. 6. >[...] This Buddha, used in some programs at the University of Toronto, shows that patience is in order. >[...] A further improvement improvement is to use something I have called a "Percent Done Progress Indicator". This combines all the advantages that I have listed before. In addition to showing that works is being done and progress is being made, it also indicates approximately how long it will be before the job is finished. >The earliest reported use of progress indicators was apparently by Robert Spence in 1976, with something like this clock face. >I used progress indicators in a file transfer program in 1978, and integrated them into the PERQ POS operating system in 1980 as shows here. When the hand reaches the bottom of the screen here, the program will be compete. >[...] For those program that cannot calculate how long they will run, it is still a good idea to show that they are executing using a technique called "Random Progress". In the PERQ POS operating system, as progress is made, the busy bee flies around the screen. >And in the Sapphire window manager, the pattern in the progress bar continuous changes. We have already seen this used in earlier example such as this one from Xerox. >IT IS GENERALLY A GOOD IDEA TO USE TECHNIQUES LIKE THIS THAT WILL NOT BE CONFUSED WITH PERCENT DONE PROGRESS. (Brad didn't actually shout that, but it's an important point so I capitalized for the benefit of Google and their GMail users! ;) ) >[...] The experiment suggests that percent done progress indicators can have a positive effect on user's attitudes towards the computer system. >Intuitively, this is because they can decrease the user's anxiety while waiting for jobs to finish, and therefore increase their satisfaction with the system. >Progress indicators also give the user enough information so that they can estimate when jobs will be finished, so that other activities can be scheduled appropriately. >Obviously, progress indicators are not a solution to slow execution times, but they do make the waiting more tolerable. >The benefits of progress indicators are therefore sufficient to warrant including them in many future computer systems. Who Made That Progress Bar? https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/who-made-that-progress-bar.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/who-made-that-pr... >“People wait for all sorts of things every day, sometimes more happily than others,” wrote the interface designer Bob Stahl in a 1986 article for Computerworld. “The problem is how the user feels about waiting.” At the time, machines were often slow and unreliable, and users didn’t always know when their programs crashed. A “progress bar” might mitigate frustration, Stahl suggested, by signaling that bits were flipping with a purpose somewhere deep inside the C.P.U. >The push to make computers more user-friendly gained momentum in the early 1980s. At a 1985 conference on the nascent field of computer-human interactions, a graduate student named Brad A. Myers presented a paper on the importance of what he called “percent-done progress indicators.” “I had the sense that they were useful and important, and not used as much as they should have been,” Myers says today. (He’s now on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University.) He told his colleagues that progress bars made computer users less anxious and more efficient, and could even help them to “relax effectively” at work. >To prove his point, Myers asked 48 fellow students to run searches on a computer database, with and without a progress bar for guidance. (He used a capsule that filled from left to right — like a giant thermometer from a charity drive, tipped on its side.) Then he had them rate their experience. Eighty-six percent said they liked the bars. “People didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate,” Myers says. “They still preferred the progress bar to not having anything at all.” >Since the ‘80s, other kinds of progress bars — audio, tactile — have been suggested, but the horizontal form prevails. There have been some refinements: Bars now strobe in color, or show an animated ribbing that slides back against the grain. These effects can fool the brain and make a bar appear to move more quickly, says Chris Harrison, another Carnegie Mellon scientist. Because people hate to see a progress bar reach a standstill, some inch forever forward even while a task is stalling out. For Harrison, these tricks raise a funny question: “Do users really want the truth, or do they want the more relaxed, more comfortable experience?” >There’s a deeper question still: Is a progress bar a tool to make us more efficient or a sop that helps us pass the time? Its ancestor, the pen-and-paper “progress chart,” showed up in the early 20th century and was hailed at the time as a major innovation. It “refers all facts to the irreducible and final element of human life — time,” wrote Walter Polakov, an early pioneer in project management (and dedicated Marxist), in 1923. “Because it is true to the human dimension, it is both human and humane; hence it obliterates conflicts between men and management, promotes the fullest exercise of man’s creative forces and places work in its proper relation to life.”
brainlessdev 5y ago
So is the progress bar on GitHub and many webpages. I think in most sites, users aren't interested in how much it's loaded but rather in the fact that it's loading at all (note that this doesn't apply to all progress bars). Implementing a fake progress bar can be done once and it works everywhere, but a controlled progress bar that's accurate needs to be connected to some actual progress data, and this is engineering work for questionable results.
makeitrain 5y ago
Progress bars are like project managers. They try to provide realistic perspectives on what's going on, but at the end of the day they only have a vague understanding of what's happening and how much work is left.
- midrus 5y ago
  Except they also add tons of overhead which also makes everything go slower, including that meeting to discuss why we go so slow.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Reminds of the time NPM (the CLI) was made slower by having an inefficient progressbar, disabling the progressbar made installations significantly faster. https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283 https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283 So maybe progressbars are not always so different than project managers?
    - midrus 5y ago
      New insult for PMs: You're worse than NPM's progress bar!!
throwawaysea 5y ago
One thing I haven’t figured out is why Gmail’s performance is so bad in Firefox. It feels like it takes noticeably longer to load and to perform actions compared to Chrome. For example, if you take some action and immediately try to close the tab, you’ll get a pop-up warning about an action that may not be saved if you leave the page. That doesn’t happen on Chrome. But I find it hard to believe that this is some shortcoming of Firefox versus a fault of Google’s. Anyone know what’s going on?
- Santosh83 5y ago
  Google obviously is not interested in non-Chrome browsers beyond making their apps essentially functional. If its more janky and slow then be it on your own head for not using their recommended browser or mobile app.
pjerem 5y ago
All progress bars are like this nowadays. At least for fast jobs (seconds to minute) where estimating time is hard, unreliable, and probably useless. Better fake a progress bar than add dozens of time estimation code for no real value, as long as errors are managed. The only thing you should try to manage is to detect when things are stuck for real and stop the fake animation / manage the situation. But even this is hard. But all of this is just exploiting a psychological gimmick which make you feel than an animation with a predictable end feels to end faster than, say, some spinner.
editkid 5y ago
The psychology of these versus, for example, an infinite spinner strikes me as interesting. The loading bar, even though it's fake, has an end and makes it feel like you're getting closer to the wait being over. Works for me.
marcinignac 5y ago
Often longing for the old days of Flash websites with byte per byte precise loading bars that as slow as they were back then they actually meant something.
rswskg 5y ago
I got a project stopped at work when I revealed something similar to the product director. Our competitor had a live incrementing number of currently available positions which the product directer thought was real, I had to show him the code and that it reset each time we loaded the browser. Saved alot of annoying conversations from that.
globular-toast 5y ago
I've always assumed progress bars are either fake or meaningless, unless I know otherwise. Meaningless ones are like the file transfer ones which don't take into account the overhead of small files vs large files.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  Love it when the estimated to be 20 minute file copy job turns into a 4 hour one when you are fighting with deadlines.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alberth 5y ago
Progress bars are inherently difficult to create since you need to predict the future to provide an accurate status on progress. Let's just consider what would factor into an accurate status bar. Gmail would need to know in advance: 1. the total payload size (which is different for everyone since some might have locally cached assets and everyones inbox size is different) 2. would need to know # of assets to be downloaded by the user (since # of assets, not just file size, affects load time) 3. how fast your computer will render the webpage (different processors, browsers, versions, etc all affect load time) 4. how fast is your internet connection and pack loss (more pack loss on mobile networks, etc) 5. is there any blocking content on the page that will affect delaying "first paint". (Why things like Lighthouse exists) And many more factors. This is unneeded complexity when instead, you can just display an animation to distract the user while the page loads. This is 100% a K.I.S.S.
- alickz 5y ago
  Why even show a (falsely) determinate progress bar over an indeterminate one then? An indeterminate circular progress bar would distract the user just as much but with less lying.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Probably because in the normal case where it does finish loading relatively quickly, the progress bar causes the perception of faster loading.
    - saalweachter 5y ago
      If the "loading bar" moves everyone once in a while, it acts as a "did the page freeze" indicator. "Should I reload the page... oh, it just moved up a little."
- capableweb 5y ago
  There is a set amount of HTTP requests happening when you load gmail. When I just tried it out now, it seems to be about 200 before the page has fully loaded. Instead of doing all of what you wrote, figure out which request is the last one, and a couple of the ones in the middle and make the progressbar incrementally go up as the browser finishes the requests. This is typically how games handle it, since the loading is split into "components"/"groups" anyways, so each "group" acts as a checkpoint, maybe around 20% of the total loading time. If you're loading assets, you could just animate the progress between loading those assets, within the group as well, otherwise just animating the bar moving between the groups. Tada, you have a progress bar that actually bars progress, and it's still simple.
pohl 5y ago
This defeats the point of a loading bar: it’s supposted to give an estimate of progress, not fill up at a rate entirely unrelated to actual loading! I'd say it's actually fulfilling the real point of a loading bar: to keep the user pacified through some period of waiting that you couldn't engineer away.
- jeffwask 5y ago
  100%. Loading indicators are psychological placebos for the user.
  - QuercusMax 5y ago
    Reminds me of a story my old boss used to tell about how they dealt with complaints about long waits for elevators in one high-rise building: putting mirrors on the walls. With sufficient distraction (everyone likes looking at themself, or at least can't help it) the elevators were no longer "too slow"!
    - jrootabega 5y ago
      Once one gets old enough, you'll just get up and pee whenever something is slow on the computer.
      - apricot 5y ago
        I've been known to get up and code whenever something was too slow on the toilet.
      - jeffwask 5y ago
        I sort of miss the 5 minute compile time coffee breaks.
      - QuercusMax 5y ago
        Or you can just drink too much coffee and la croix and have to pee all the time. :)
    - 5y ago
ewagsjr 5y ago
more importantly, why does it take so long to load my email...
kangalioo 5y ago
There's a _ton_ of those pseudo loading bars I wish so hard people would make real loading bars. Ones that _actually_ give you an indication of progress, that don't stall forever on 5% and then jump to 100% instantaneously, or rest on 100% for half a minute before actually proceeding. Idk, it can't be that hard, right? You know what your software is doing; let each part of the process report how far along it is, and together with rough knowledge how much time each part takes proportionally, you can calculate a very useful progress bar.
- taeric 5y ago
  Since the main stalling point will be slow network connections, you may know how many steps you have to do, but not how long they will take. So, I confess I assume you're second paragraph is sarcastic?
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Good luck finding a single person who would complain if all pauses and accelerations of their loading bar were indicators of a network problem. That's exactly what people think progress bars are, rather than cartoons to distract you while you wait.
    - taeric 5y ago
      Anything that makes it look stuck will get a complaint. So will taking too long. Getting stuck and taking too long will get more complaints.
somehnacct3757 5y ago
Tricks like this are self-perpetuating because it teaches users that progress bars are UI meant to model a duration. This is of course impossible to calculate without a crystal ball, as other posters have pointed out. But since it's what users expect, web developers must create an animation that meets user expectation.
gambiting 5y ago
I had to code a loading bar indicator in a big online-only game few years ago and well, not really proud of the solution. It was basically that 0-90% of the bar showed the actual loading process of the game's assets, then the last 10% would load in only if the server was ready to let you in, which obviously we had no control over and no way to realistically estimate it. So when servers weren't under load, the load bar was realistic, you were waiting for the assets to load, then once you got to 90% it would just lerp over one second to 100% for smoothness and load you in, but if the servers were under load you'd get to 90% and nothing would happen whatosever.
- jer0me 5y ago
  In this case, I think I would have gone with a “shimmering” full loading bar when waiting to connect to the server.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Well yes, but that's the issue when working on a project with 800 people - my job was to make the loading bar work, the art direction didn't care that it would get stuck, and I can't override an artist and just make it shimmer.
lifeisgood99 5y ago
Gmail still provides a simple HTML page: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049
- bondarchuk 5y ago
  I had it as my default for a long time (i.e. it loaded the simple version when I go to gmail.com), but then I accidentally visited the complicated version and there doesn't seem to be any way to set the simple one as default anymore. I can still use the simple version by using the special link but nevertheless a bit bothersome.
  - lifeisgood99 5y ago
    I bookmarked the simple version and called it a day.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Note that the basic HTML version loads faster on slow connections but everything else is slower, because the big ball of javascript is there to hide latency. It has its niche, but on a decent connection the regular version is faster.
Causality1 5y ago
Deceiving the user into thinking it's a tool for them while actually being a way to manipulate them. For Google that's extraordinarily on-brand.
marcodiego 5y ago
The first time I've seen something similar was in IE5, I think. The loading indicator oscillates before connecting to the server. Once connected, it started progressing even without receiving any packet. It was easy to tell because win9x had a nice indicator when network packets were sent or received. It seemed very strange since the beginning: "It is not right... it is progressing but I see no packets incoming...". The progress indicator then progresses slower and slower until it reaches half the bar exactly when timeout is reached and a popup with an error message is shown. It was very frustrating because I could no longer trust the browser. Now, if I want to know if there is progress or not, I have to look at the network indicator which could be disturbed by other network activity. At the time, connections failing were not all that rare and being able to quickly retry to load the page was an important time saver because you didn't had to wait for the timeout. I once saw my father, who was not well versed, waiting for a page that simply would not load, but instead of retrying he just kept waiting until the indicator slowly slowed down to reach half the bar and only then tell him that the timeout was reached. I approached and said: "It is not loading, try again.", he said: "It is progressing!", I said: "I don't think it is progressing... I think they are lying to us.". We then went back to Netscape Navigator. This is bad UI. No matter what experts or even tests say. A lie is a lie and is not something a system should do to the user. The correct way to do this is to use an indicator that oscillates or runs around. I think they were invented for exactly that case.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  > The correct way to do this is to use an indicator that oscillates > or runs around. I think they were invented for exactly that case. Which is why any open-loop activity indicator is called a "spinner", even if the actual graphic today does not spin.
- dspillett 5y ago
  > IE5, I think. At least as far back as IE4 IIRC. I'm not sure about earlier, as while I was around for them being in circulation I never used 1/2/3 extensively. > Once connected, it started progressing even without receiving any packet And could climb up to about 80% before the first packet was received. It was an intentional con to pacify the user and it worked: I've know people convinced that IE was faster than other browsers because when they access a script that connects quickly but takes ages to send out the first byte of response IE initially looks like it is doing something sooner than [insert competitor here] that truthfully showed no progress until data started arriving. It meant that even if MS wanted to change the behaviour to be more truthful in later versions they would have an issue: the same people would make a noise about the new version being slower than the old. It adds a layer of interpretation to some user problem reports too: “it nearly completed, but then just displayed an error” could mean one of a wider range of things than otherwise.
martini333 5y ago
Welcome to the real world
alphakappa 5y ago
While not technically a precise loading indicator, this seems to be along the lines of giving a better user experience than anything else. Gmail has real dark patterns though. One of which is to load the emails first, and then after a short delay (even on a fast connection) load advertisement rows on top. So if you attempt to click one of the new emails on top, you're just as likely to hit an ad that just loaded in that space. Probably creates a ton of false clicks for whoever is paying for that advert.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  If you don't care for the ads in Gmail they are easy to nerf: don't use the "Multiple Inboxes" view, or if you like it keep using it but disable the "Promotions" and "Social" tabs.
BigBalli 5y ago
"This defeats the point of a loading bar: it’s supposed to give an estimate of progress"... A loading animation is supposed to placate an eager user and deliver a more pleasant UX (by not making us wonder if something is wrong).
rahimiali 5y ago
A loading spinner would convey the exact same information without being misleading.
g_sch 5y ago
Anecdotally I've noticed that nearly all progress bars on major apps/sites are fake these days. Instagram and Facebook also have "progress indicators" (usually used for uploads) that just show asymptotic progress regardless of whether anything is happening. I know it's a minor issue because rendering an accurate progress bar is a hard problem, but in my view this is just another example of how behavioralism leads to a generalized erosion of trust in the interfaces and technologies people use. It may be true that, in an A/B test, users who see the fake progress bar are happier or more patient. But at some point, people are going to realize they're being lied to, and they're going to wonder what else you're lying to them about. This is why I think the stories of "[$App] listens to your conversations" / "[$App] charges you extra when your phone battery is low" etc. remain so persistent, even when there's sometimes little or no evidence to back them up. If designers have decided that a little psychological manipulation is okay, why wouldn't they be manipulating us elsewhere too?
ok123456 5y ago
The big selling point of GMail originally was the amount of space you got. Earlier versions of the login page advertised this by having a bit of javascript that showed an increasing number showing you how the quota was increasing. If you inspected source, it just had a little exp function with different constants depending on how far in the future it was.
deanCommie 5y ago
It's so weird the cycles of idealism that permeate through our industry with every new generation of tech nerds. * Project management and software development methodologies are bullshit! Let's all follow the "Just get shit done" process! * Loading icons shouldn't lie! * Unlimited plans should be unlimited! If your business model can't scale with everyone backing up 10Petabytes of manga, don't offer it to me!
mdoms 5y ago
Wait until you hear about Every Progress Bar Ever.
pabbasian 5y ago
not that easy, almost everybody does or used to do this.

194 points by goranmoomin 5y ago

Progress bars are hard. You could try to come up with something that guesses the user's connection speed from the first few bytes, somehow checks what's already in the cache and you will still have an inaccurate progress bar. Probably even one that isn't fullly filled up before the page is ready.

arduinomancer 5y ago

It’s not worth the extra complexity for something that loads that fast. As a user why would I even care about a real loading bar here? I just care whether the page loads or not.

PikachuEXE 5y ago

After switching to Thunderbird I can never go back to Gmail. https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ For really important mails I use ProtonMail.

CyberShadow 5y ago
Perhaps odd, but I've had the opposite experience. I switched to Thunderbird at the same time I switched to Linux; after some tweaking, I was mostly happy with it. Then, in some major version, it started frequently freezing up for thirty seconds at a time. Authoring emails in it became impossible. I could not downgrade it because it was version-locked with some system libraries (libnss OSLT). I could not debug it because that was blocked by a bug filed on Bugzilla ten years ago with no fixes or workarounds. Then, in another major version, they killed XUL extensions. I still hope to stop depending on Google services some day, but at that point I would probably switch to or write some webmail with a similar-enough UI to Gmail.
- HeadlessChild 5y ago
  Thunderbird has been PITA due to its major updates that breaks existing add-on's which I tend to use.
- jamienicol 5y ago
  To be fair though, the freeze was probably caused by a xul extension. I switched from Gmail to fastmail last week, after planning to do so "one day" for a few years. Using a mixture of the web client and Thunderbird, just like I did when using Gmail. No regrets so far, I recommend taking to leap!
  - CyberShadow 5y ago
    > To be fair though, the freeze was probably caused by a xul extension. No, it's still there even in the most recent version. (Maybe I just have too much mail?)
LordAtlas 5y ago
I used to use Thunderbird. But Gmail's spam filtering capability combined with their search are something I missed. Unless something has changed in the past 3-4 years.
- capableweb 5y ago
  To make things a bit clearer: Thunderbird is a email client, but doesn't actually hosts emails. Gmail is both a email client, and you can host your email with them. But that doesn't mean you have to use Gmail "The Client" to access Gmail "The Emails". So in short, you can use Thunderbird as a client with your @gmail.com address, so you still have the same spam filter and search, but a lighter and faster UI.

sk5t 5y ago

Of course there is an xkcd for the long history of terrible loading-progress bars: https://xkcd.com/612/ https://xkcd.com/612/

cab404 5y ago

I knew that Google is evil, but that's whole another level.

drawqrtz 5y ago

I feel like this is the case for soo mamy loading bars. Especially with games. Loading bar zips to 99% and then you wait for a few minutes. Yea right. I guess it is really hard not to make it frustrating.

louissan 5y ago

They should add a "dislike" button for this, me thinks 8o)

sharmin123 5y ago

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rektide 5y ago

gmails application architecture has most decidedly not scaled to the bigger application it is today. once a rare gem of a just in time loading app, now it's just so so so so so so slow. unloved & destitute.

dijit 5y ago

Honestly though: the idea of loading 20MiB of JS to read a 24KiB message is weird. Like: I get it, traditional mail clients kinda suck, they feel bloated and janky. But the more I think of it, the more I think that webmail was a mistake, especially webmail as heavy as GMail has become.

vbezhenar 5y ago
> Honestly though: the idea of loading 20MiB of JS to read a 24KiB message is weird. What about downloading 70 MB of compressed binary code for Thunderbird? > Like: I get it, traditional mail clients kinda suck, they feel bloated and janky. But the more I think of it, the more I think that webmail was a mistake, especially webmail as heavy as GMail has become. I don't see how does it differ from traditional e-mail clients, except that you don't have to install, configure and allow unlimited access to your computer.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  It differs very greatly from traditional desktop mailers in that the search on gmail is fast (because it brings thousands of machines to bear on your request for an instant) and the search in desktop apps takes forever (because your little computer no matter how beefy does not have a million cores).
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    I have a few GB of mail folders. I can search them more or less instantaneous, using Kontact (KMail). Full-text indexing isn't dark magic at all.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      I guess we have different requirements of scale. My gmail is over 300GB (one of the reasons I have a Google 1 subscription).
      - 5y ago

bserge 5y ago

Yeah, their spam filter is also fake. You "report as spam", at least on Android. So it's up to Google to decide if it's actually spam.

rbrbr 5y ago

I figured that out over a year ago. One of many fakes from Google.

Ndymium 5y ago

I remember Internet Explorer also doing this back in the day. When I was a kid I assumed it was showing correct progress, and I'd be patiently waiting for no payoff. Only much later I learned it meant nothing, it was just showing it wasn't dead. I'm not sure about GMail's case, but I recall Mac OS X (back when it was called that) used to do something like this. Since showing a correct progress bar doesn't make it look so nice (it might be stuck at 90% for longer than it took to get there) and might be difficult to estimate, they instead wrote the last boot time into a file and on the next boot would render a smooth progress bar that would follow the timer. In my experience it made for a reasonable estimation of the boot time and I thought it was a clever solution.

drawqrtz 5y ago
What a clever solution! I like it because it still f gives an realistic indication of how long it will take!
- editkid 5y ago
  Yeah, that's clever indeed.
jgtrosh 5y ago
Jenkins also does that (estimate progress based on last duration), but also shows estimated status equal to the previous one. If you know what it means, you know what state you're trying to fix or maintain, but it is quite confusing at first.
DonHopkins 5y ago
Remember how the original Mac used to plop down icons of all your system extensions one-by-one along the bottom of the screen, in the order that it loaded them, which helped you know how long it would take to boot, and figure out which one crashed your system? And how all the k001 k1dz had lots and lots of extensions? Well there was actually a special extension that made you even k001er: you could paste as many and whatever icons you desired into its resource fork, and it would plop them down one by one during the boot, delaying a bit between each. Sure it took a little longer to boot, but it made you such a bad-ass!

Mizza 5y ago

They all are.

jacobsimon 5y ago
Surprised this isn’t higher. Loading bars are universally faked on the web.
- Izkata 5y ago
  My favorite was writing.com - I don't know if it's still like this, but there was a period where they put a javascript loading spinner on the page by hiding the already-on-the-page content, let it spin for a moment, then showed the content.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    There are a lot of sites that have fake delays to load information to make it seem like they're doing more work than they actually are.

chrisMyzel 5y ago

Youtube & Netflix do this the same way…actually a lot of JS/TS frontend frameworks nowadays have this 1px loading bar at the top which behaves the same way (speedup, slow down never reach 100%)

welder 5y ago
I think loading indicators fall into two categories: 1. full page 2. unobtrusive Those 1px progress bars are unobtrusive because you can partially render data you've already received while still conveying that more data is loading. To make a JS progress bar correctly show precent of data loaded over a network you would need to first know the total data size. That's why JS progress bars are always auto-incrementing and don't represent actual loading progress.
- chrisMyzel 5y ago
  > To make a JS progress bar correctly show precent of data loaded over a network you would need to first know the total data size. correct but what's the problem with determining it server-side

jeffbee 5y ago

They basically borrowed this from the MacOS X booting progress bar, which is also 1000% fake. Still, this progress animation does serve a purpose. Normally it is prompt, but if you see it at all it means that Gmail is behind the scenes trying to make your account work correctly. So in that sense it serves as a kind of binary indicator.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

I find this author's semi-outrage amusing. Oh, what a world of deception your virgin senses have yet to comprehend. The deceptive loading bar has a loooong history through a solid two decades of early MacOS and Windows. I honestly think the early status bars are the subconscious inspriation for the software estimation joke about the first 90% of code takes the first 90% of budget, the last 10& take the other 90%

DonHopkins 5y ago

Percent Done Progress Indicators 1985 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnzaS18XuJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnzaS18XuJ4 >Brad Myers >This video reports on early research about progress bars. It was previously published as: Brad A. Myers. Percent-Done Progress Indicators in Practice and Experiments, Videotape shown at SIGCHI '85. San Francisco, CA. Apr. 14-18, 1985. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 19, no. 6. >[...] This Buddha, used in some programs at the University of Toronto, shows that patience is in order. >[...] A further improvement improvement is to use something I have called a "Percent Done Progress Indicator". This combines all the advantages that I have listed before. In addition to showing that works is being done and progress is being made, it also indicates approximately how long it will be before the job is finished. >The earliest reported use of progress indicators was apparently by Robert Spence in 1976, with something like this clock face. >I used progress indicators in a file transfer program in 1978, and integrated them into the PERQ POS operating system in 1980 as shows here. When the hand reaches the bottom of the screen here, the program will be compete. >[...] For those program that cannot calculate how long they will run, it is still a good idea to show that they are executing using a technique called "Random Progress". In the PERQ POS operating system, as progress is made, the busy bee flies around the screen. >And in the Sapphire window manager, the pattern in the progress bar continuous changes. We have already seen this used in earlier example such as this one from Xerox. >IT IS GENERALLY A GOOD IDEA TO USE TECHNIQUES LIKE THIS THAT WILL NOT BE CONFUSED WITH PERCENT DONE PROGRESS. (Brad didn't actually shout that, but it's an important point so I capitalized for the benefit of Google and their GMail users! ;) ) >[...] The experiment suggests that percent done progress indicators can have a positive effect on user's attitudes towards the computer system. >Intuitively, this is because they can decrease the user's anxiety while waiting for jobs to finish, and therefore increase their satisfaction with the system. >Progress indicators also give the user enough information so that they can estimate when jobs will be finished, so that other activities can be scheduled appropriately. >Obviously, progress indicators are not a solution to slow execution times, but they do make the waiting more tolerable. >The benefits of progress indicators are therefore sufficient to warrant including them in many future computer systems. Who Made That Progress Bar? https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/who-made-that-progress-bar.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/who-made-that-pr... >“People wait for all sorts of things every day, sometimes more happily than others,” wrote the interface designer Bob Stahl in a 1986 article for Computerworld. “The problem is how the user feels about waiting.” At the time, machines were often slow and unreliable, and users didn’t always know when their programs crashed. A “progress bar” might mitigate frustration, Stahl suggested, by signaling that bits were flipping with a purpose somewhere deep inside the C.P.U. >The push to make computers more user-friendly gained momentum in the early 1980s. At a 1985 conference on the nascent field of computer-human interactions, a graduate student named Brad A. Myers presented a paper on the importance of what he called “percent-done progress indicators.” “I had the sense that they were useful and important, and not used as much as they should have been,” Myers says today. (He’s now on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University.) He told his colleagues that progress bars made computer users less anxious and more efficient, and could even help them to “relax effectively” at work. >To prove his point, Myers asked 48 fellow students to run searches on a computer database, with and without a progress bar for guidance. (He used a capsule that filled from left to right — like a giant thermometer from a charity drive, tipped on its side.) Then he had them rate their experience. Eighty-six percent said they liked the bars. “People didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate,” Myers says. “They still preferred the progress bar to not having anything at all.” >Since the ‘80s, other kinds of progress bars — audio, tactile — have been suggested, but the horizontal form prevails. There have been some refinements: Bars now strobe in color, or show an animated ribbing that slides back against the grain. These effects can fool the brain and make a bar appear to move more quickly, says Chris Harrison, another Carnegie Mellon scientist. Because people hate to see a progress bar reach a standstill, some inch forever forward even while a task is stalling out. For Harrison, these tricks raise a funny question: “Do users really want the truth, or do they want the more relaxed, more comfortable experience?” >There’s a deeper question still: Is a progress bar a tool to make us more efficient or a sop that helps us pass the time? Its ancestor, the pen-and-paper “progress chart,” showed up in the early 20th century and was hailed at the time as a major innovation. It “refers all facts to the irreducible and final element of human life — time,” wrote Walter Polakov, an early pioneer in project management (and dedicated Marxist), in 1923. “Because it is true to the human dimension, it is both human and humane; hence it obliterates conflicts between men and management, promotes the fullest exercise of man’s creative forces and places work in its proper relation to life.”

brainlessdev 5y ago

So is the progress bar on GitHub and many webpages. I think in most sites, users aren't interested in how much it's loaded but rather in the fact that it's loading at all (note that this doesn't apply to all progress bars). Implementing a fake progress bar can be done once and it works everywhere, but a controlled progress bar that's accurate needs to be connected to some actual progress data, and this is engineering work for questionable results.

makeitrain 5y ago

Progress bars are like project managers. They try to provide realistic perspectives on what's going on, but at the end of the day they only have a vague understanding of what's happening and how much work is left.

midrus 5y ago
Except they also add tons of overhead which also makes everything go slower, including that meeting to discuss why we go so slow.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Reminds of the time NPM (the CLI) was made slower by having an inefficient progressbar, disabling the progressbar made installations significantly faster. https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283 https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283 So maybe progressbars are not always so different than project managers?
  - midrus 5y ago
    New insult for PMs: You're worse than NPM's progress bar!!

throwawaysea 5y ago

One thing I haven’t figured out is why Gmail’s performance is so bad in Firefox. It feels like it takes noticeably longer to load and to perform actions compared to Chrome. For example, if you take some action and immediately try to close the tab, you’ll get a pop-up warning about an action that may not be saved if you leave the page. That doesn’t happen on Chrome. But I find it hard to believe that this is some shortcoming of Firefox versus a fault of Google’s. Anyone know what’s going on?

Santosh83 5y ago
Google obviously is not interested in non-Chrome browsers beyond making their apps essentially functional. If its more janky and slow then be it on your own head for not using their recommended browser or mobile app.

pjerem 5y ago

All progress bars are like this nowadays. At least for fast jobs (seconds to minute) where estimating time is hard, unreliable, and probably useless. Better fake a progress bar than add dozens of time estimation code for no real value, as long as errors are managed. The only thing you should try to manage is to detect when things are stuck for real and stop the fake animation / manage the situation. But even this is hard. But all of this is just exploiting a psychological gimmick which make you feel than an animation with a predictable end feels to end faster than, say, some spinner.

editkid 5y ago

The psychology of these versus, for example, an infinite spinner strikes me as interesting. The loading bar, even though it's fake, has an end and makes it feel like you're getting closer to the wait being over. Works for me.

marcinignac 5y ago

Often longing for the old days of Flash websites with byte per byte precise loading bars that as slow as they were back then they actually meant something.

rswskg 5y ago

I got a project stopped at work when I revealed something similar to the product director. Our competitor had a live incrementing number of currently available positions which the product directer thought was real, I had to show him the code and that it reset each time we loaded the browser. Saved alot of annoying conversations from that.

globular-toast 5y ago

I've always assumed progress bars are either fake or meaningless, unless I know otherwise. Meaningless ones are like the file transfer ones which don't take into account the overhead of small files vs large files.

faeyanpiraat 5y ago
Love it when the estimated to be 20 minute file copy job turns into a 4 hour one when you are fighting with deadlines.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

alberth 5y ago

Progress bars are inherently difficult to create since you need to predict the future to provide an accurate status on progress. Let's just consider what would factor into an accurate status bar. Gmail would need to know in advance: 1. the total payload size (which is different for everyone since some might have locally cached assets and everyones inbox size is different) 2. would need to know # of assets to be downloaded by the user (since # of assets, not just file size, affects load time) 3. how fast your computer will render the webpage (different processors, browsers, versions, etc all affect load time) 4. how fast is your internet connection and pack loss (more pack loss on mobile networks, etc) 5. is there any blocking content on the page that will affect delaying "first paint". (Why things like Lighthouse exists) And many more factors. This is unneeded complexity when instead, you can just display an animation to distract the user while the page loads. This is 100% a K.I.S.S.

alickz 5y ago
Why even show a (falsely) determinate progress bar over an indeterminate one then? An indeterminate circular progress bar would distract the user just as much but with less lying.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Probably because in the normal case where it does finish loading relatively quickly, the progress bar causes the perception of faster loading.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    If the "loading bar" moves everyone once in a while, it acts as a "did the page freeze" indicator. "Should I reload the page... oh, it just moved up a little."
capableweb 5y ago
There is a set amount of HTTP requests happening when you load gmail. When I just tried it out now, it seems to be about 200 before the page has fully loaded. Instead of doing all of what you wrote, figure out which request is the last one, and a couple of the ones in the middle and make the progressbar incrementally go up as the browser finishes the requests. This is typically how games handle it, since the loading is split into "components"/"groups" anyways, so each "group" acts as a checkpoint, maybe around 20% of the total loading time. If you're loading assets, you could just animate the progress between loading those assets, within the group as well, otherwise just animating the bar moving between the groups. Tada, you have a progress bar that actually bars progress, and it's still simple.

pohl 5y ago

This defeats the point of a loading bar: it’s supposted to give an estimate of progress, not fill up at a rate entirely unrelated to actual loading! I'd say it's actually fulfilling the real point of a loading bar: to keep the user pacified through some period of waiting that you couldn't engineer away.

jeffwask 5y ago
100%. Loading indicators are psychological placebos for the user.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  Reminds me of a story my old boss used to tell about how they dealt with complaints about long waits for elevators in one high-rise building: putting mirrors on the walls. With sufficient distraction (everyone likes looking at themself, or at least can't help it) the elevators were no longer "too slow"!
  - jrootabega 5y ago
    Once one gets old enough, you'll just get up and pee whenever something is slow on the computer.
    - apricot 5y ago
      I've been known to get up and code whenever something was too slow on the toilet.
    - jeffwask 5y ago
      I sort of miss the 5 minute compile time coffee breaks.
    - QuercusMax 5y ago
      Or you can just drink too much coffee and la croix and have to pee all the time. :)
  - 5y ago

ewagsjr 5y ago

more importantly, why does it take so long to load my email...

kangalioo 5y ago

There's a _ton_ of those pseudo loading bars I wish so hard people would make real loading bars. Ones that _actually_ give you an indication of progress, that don't stall forever on 5% and then jump to 100% instantaneously, or rest on 100% for half a minute before actually proceeding. Idk, it can't be that hard, right? You know what your software is doing; let each part of the process report how far along it is, and together with rough knowledge how much time each part takes proportionally, you can calculate a very useful progress bar.

taeric 5y ago
Since the main stalling point will be slow network connections, you may know how many steps you have to do, but not how long they will take. So, I confess I assume you're second paragraph is sarcastic?
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Good luck finding a single person who would complain if all pauses and accelerations of their loading bar were indicators of a network problem. That's exactly what people think progress bars are, rather than cartoons to distract you while you wait.
  - taeric 5y ago
    Anything that makes it look stuck will get a complaint. So will taking too long. Getting stuck and taking too long will get more complaints.

somehnacct3757 5y ago

Tricks like this are self-perpetuating because it teaches users that progress bars are UI meant to model a duration. This is of course impossible to calculate without a crystal ball, as other posters have pointed out. But since it's what users expect, web developers must create an animation that meets user expectation.

gambiting 5y ago

I had to code a loading bar indicator in a big online-only game few years ago and well, not really proud of the solution. It was basically that 0-90% of the bar showed the actual loading process of the game's assets, then the last 10% would load in only if the server was ready to let you in, which obviously we had no control over and no way to realistically estimate it. So when servers weren't under load, the load bar was realistic, you were waiting for the assets to load, then once you got to 90% it would just lerp over one second to 100% for smoothness and load you in, but if the servers were under load you'd get to 90% and nothing would happen whatosever.

jer0me 5y ago
In this case, I think I would have gone with a “shimmering” full loading bar when waiting to connect to the server.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Well yes, but that's the issue when working on a project with 800 people - my job was to make the loading bar work, the art direction didn't care that it would get stuck, and I can't override an artist and just make it shimmer.

lifeisgood99 5y ago

Gmail still provides a simple HTML page: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049

bondarchuk 5y ago
I had it as my default for a long time (i.e. it loaded the simple version when I go to gmail.com), but then I accidentally visited the complicated version and there doesn't seem to be any way to set the simple one as default anymore. I can still use the simple version by using the special link but nevertheless a bit bothersome.
- lifeisgood99 5y ago
  I bookmarked the simple version and called it a day.
jeffbee 5y ago
Note that the basic HTML version loads faster on slow connections but everything else is slower, because the big ball of javascript is there to hide latency. It has its niche, but on a decent connection the regular version is faster.

Causality1 5y ago

Deceiving the user into thinking it's a tool for them while actually being a way to manipulate them. For Google that's extraordinarily on-brand.

marcodiego 5y ago

The first time I've seen something similar was in IE5, I think. The loading indicator oscillates before connecting to the server. Once connected, it started progressing even without receiving any packet. It was easy to tell because win9x had a nice indicator when network packets were sent or received. It seemed very strange since the beginning: "It is not right... it is progressing but I see no packets incoming...". The progress indicator then progresses slower and slower until it reaches half the bar exactly when timeout is reached and a popup with an error message is shown. It was very frustrating because I could no longer trust the browser. Now, if I want to know if there is progress or not, I have to look at the network indicator which could be disturbed by other network activity. At the time, connections failing were not all that rare and being able to quickly retry to load the page was an important time saver because you didn't had to wait for the timeout. I once saw my father, who was not well versed, waiting for a page that simply would not load, but instead of retrying he just kept waiting until the indicator slowly slowed down to reach half the bar and only then tell him that the timeout was reached. I approached and said: "It is not loading, try again.", he said: "It is progressing!", I said: "I don't think it is progressing... I think they are lying to us.". We then went back to Netscape Navigator. This is bad UI. No matter what experts or even tests say. A lie is a lie and is not something a system should do to the user. The correct way to do this is to use an indicator that oscillates or runs around. I think they were invented for exactly that case.

dotancohen 5y ago
> The correct way to do this is to use an indicator that oscillates > or runs around. I think they were invented for exactly that case. Which is why any open-loop activity indicator is called a "spinner", even if the actual graphic today does not spin.
dspillett 5y ago
> IE5, I think. At least as far back as IE4 IIRC. I'm not sure about earlier, as while I was around for them being in circulation I never used 1/2/3 extensively. > Once connected, it started progressing even without receiving any packet And could climb up to about 80% before the first packet was received. It was an intentional con to pacify the user and it worked: I've know people convinced that IE was faster than other browsers because when they access a script that connects quickly but takes ages to send out the first byte of response IE initially looks like it is doing something sooner than [insert competitor here] that truthfully showed no progress until data started arriving. It meant that even if MS wanted to change the behaviour to be more truthful in later versions they would have an issue: the same people would make a noise about the new version being slower than the old. It adds a layer of interpretation to some user problem reports too: “it nearly completed, but then just displayed an error” could mean one of a wider range of things than otherwise.

martini333 5y ago

Welcome to the real world

alphakappa 5y ago

While not technically a precise loading indicator, this seems to be along the lines of giving a better user experience than anything else. Gmail has real dark patterns though. One of which is to load the emails first, and then after a short delay (even on a fast connection) load advertisement rows on top. So if you attempt to click one of the new emails on top, you're just as likely to hit an ad that just loaded in that space. Probably creates a ton of false clicks for whoever is paying for that advert.

jeffbee 5y ago
If you don't care for the ads in Gmail they are easy to nerf: don't use the "Multiple Inboxes" view, or if you like it keep using it but disable the "Promotions" and "Social" tabs.

BigBalli 5y ago

"This defeats the point of a loading bar: it’s supposed to give an estimate of progress"... A loading animation is supposed to placate an eager user and deliver a more pleasant UX (by not making us wonder if something is wrong).

rahimiali 5y ago

A loading spinner would convey the exact same information without being misleading.

g_sch 5y ago

Anecdotally I've noticed that nearly all progress bars on major apps/sites are fake these days. Instagram and Facebook also have "progress indicators" (usually used for uploads) that just show asymptotic progress regardless of whether anything is happening. I know it's a minor issue because rendering an accurate progress bar is a hard problem, but in my view this is just another example of how behavioralism leads to a generalized erosion of trust in the interfaces and technologies people use. It may be true that, in an A/B test, users who see the fake progress bar are happier or more patient. But at some point, people are going to realize they're being lied to, and they're going to wonder what else you're lying to them about. This is why I think the stories of "[$App] listens to your conversations" / "[$App] charges you extra when your phone battery is low" etc. remain so persistent, even when there's sometimes little or no evidence to back them up. If designers have decided that a little psychological manipulation is okay, why wouldn't they be manipulating us elsewhere too?

ok123456 5y ago

The big selling point of GMail originally was the amount of space you got. Earlier versions of the login page advertised this by having a bit of javascript that showed an increasing number showing you how the quota was increasing. If you inspected source, it just had a little exp function with different constants depending on how far in the future it was.

deanCommie 5y ago

It's so weird the cycles of idealism that permeate through our industry with every new generation of tech nerds. * Project management and software development methodologies are bullshit! Let's all follow the "Just get shit done" process! * Loading icons shouldn't lie! * Unlimited plans should be unlimited! If your business model can't scale with everyone backing up 10Petabytes of manga, don't offer it to me!

mdoms 5y ago

Wait until you hear about Every Progress Bar Ever.

pabbasian 5y ago

not that easy, almost everybody does or used to do this.