User Interface Gripe #8394 -- Progress Bars

[jducoeur]

Okay, yes, I understand the need to update the package. And I'm even willing to grant that there is some justification for doing a fripping 20MB download, because you're too lazy to figure out how to do a proper patch.

But look. If you're going to put a progress bar in the update window, have it mean something! In particular, it does not fill me with confidence to watch the progress bar irregularly inch from left to right -- and then dive back to the left again. And inch its way back across -- and dive back to the left again. That's not a progress bar, that's a particularly dull table-tennis game, and it's not what I want out of my software...

Comments

[tpau]

to be fair. sometimes these things are really there to show you that somethign is happening damnit and the machine is not frozen. but really the nit shouldn't look liek a progress bar

[johno.livejournal.com]

What I hate are the ones who just put up animated gif.

Yeah the progress bar is moving or the gizmo is twirling, but it doesn't mean a damned thing.

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, especially the really flashy barberpole twirl that attracts your attention the whole time it's there, even though the only time you want it to attract your attention is when it's done.

[mneme]

To be fairer, it may be that the bar is based on a "time elapsed/time projected based on current rate" thing, and that since the data is coming across in spurts, it's correcting to the point of uselessness.

What's worse are annimated scrolling images that look like progress bars -- or their fraternal cousins: multiphase installers that rather than trying to estimate the entire time a process will take, instead run one progress bar for each phase, making the actual state in any progress bar more or less irrelevant.

[jducoeur]

To be fairer, it may be that the bar is based on a "time elapsed/time projected based on current rate" thing, and that since the data is coming across in spurts, it's correcting to the point of uselessness.

Possible, but not very plausible, given that it's shooting from an apparent 95% down to an apparent 20%, in a fraction of a second. That is, the progress indicator appears to be moving steadily towards "done" -- and then does a sort of carriage return back to the beginning.

I *think* that what's going on is that it is actually just indicating the progress of the current particular phase of the update. But nothing else in the UI clues you into that, or gives you any hint of what the overall progress is -- it's just "Installing". Which I might forgive if it was some little nothing company, but this was Apple, from whom I expect better...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I recall that progress bars made up a considerable portion of the examples in the old User Interface Hall of Shame, but that one sounds pretty bad.

Was this a Windows installer from Apple? I find a lot of their Windows software pretty painful -- I get the impression that Apple people try not to spend any more than the minimum time necessary on their Windows versions before fleeing, perhaps to avoid cooties.

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

You sure some monster isn't hitting you?