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Chris's WeblogProgress barsPosted on January 09, 2009 at 11:15:00 by chris Progress bars, in theory, are a nice user interface feature that lets you see how a long task is progressing, and how long is left. However, than can be done badly. Some progress bars seem to get to the end, and then start again at the beginning, presumably on a new phase of the task. Typically there's no indication of how many times it might do this, effectively making it useless. Software installers and uninstallers seem to do this a lot. Then there are the time estimates for finishing the task. I recently asked Windows to delete a big chunk of files. It first informed me that it was "Preparing to Delete" (psyching itself up?), which took a minute or two with no progress indication at all. Then (after confirmation) came the actual deletion phase with a traditional progress bar, and an estimate of how much longer it would be doing this. The estimate spent much of the time counting up rather than down. I'd hope, given that it spent so much time "Preparing", that it could use that preparation to do a better estimate. As a software engineer I do have some sympathy; it's certainly not necessarily easy giving a meaningful progress indicator, and many jobs do take an unknown time to finish. In some cases, though, I think a Throbber would be more appropriate than a progress bar. Related tags: grumpy Comment on this entryPlease note that comments may be moderated. |
Comments
1 Abigail (not logged in) says...
Posted 8:25 p.m. on January 10, 2009
What I'd usually like to see is something that convinces me that it is, in fact, still doing something, rather than having crashed or hung or found its way into an infinite loop. I'm not usually too concerned about how long it's going to take to complete the task (if I have to close my laptop and go home before it's done, so be it), but if it's not going to complete at all, that's important to know. Offhand, I can't think of a solution that would distinguish between "still moving towards completion" and "looping, help!".
Actually, providing enough information was supplied, I suppose any measurable quantity would serve. "Deleting file 1... 2... 3... of 546" would work fine, especially if it also gave an indication of size: if it's been saying "Deleting file 14 (10k)" for the last five minutes, something's probably wrong. Combined with that, you'd want a process graphic: a bar above the progress indicator shows you that there are three steps to this process. Step 1, indexing and sizing files to delete, completed. Step 2, marking files for deletion, in progress. Step 3, obliterating those files completely, coming up after I've marked all 546 for deletion. Still working on file 17 (a file of unusual size), please bear with me... The process graphic could use width of subdivisions to suggest how long the steps are relative to each other, too: if step 1 is half the width of step 2 and step 3 is four times as wide as step 2, and we've only just started step 2, it's reasonable to suppose that we're no more than about a tenth of the way through. For standard OS tasks - moving files, deleting files, rotating photographs, changing permissions - I'd expect there to be some simple metrics that could be used to provide sensible relative timings within a task breakdown.
Er, spot the woman who's spent a lot of time working with Powerpointophilic consultants, sorry. :-)