Progress bars rarely work. A bar displaying a percentage of completed tasks gives the user an often false idea of how much time is left. Unfortunately, as is pointed out in the comments of silentk’s blog post on the subject, the percentage of tasks completed does not tell how processor-intensive the remainder of the tasks is going to be. It’s certainly important to give some sort of indication that stuff is happening, but a progress bar which gets stuck at 99% for half an hour can easily be misinterpreted as a crash, and the user might decide to give up.
Progress bars
2 responses to “Progress bars”
-
Totally agree with you. Think I’ll post a follow up about that on my blog 😉 Thanks for the link 😉
LikeLike
-
[…] to restart ssh. Argh. Never mind, but this was not all: As I mentioned in a previous post, progress bars can be useless and annoying, if they give false information. When the update resumed, it happily […]
LikeLike
Daniel Koskinen 
Leave a Reply