Ha. Reminds me of the use of mirrors in elevators, basically they give us gullible humans something to do while the machine wastes our time.
Progress bars still lie
181–190 of 232 posts
Re: Progress bars still lie
#182It isn’t always straightforward what 0-100 means - if you are downloading a file then that is one thing but what if you need to call an api, fetch some data, process some data, call another api - what percentage is each section or api call?
Users just want to know it is working.
Re: Progress bars still lie
#183It isn’t always straightforward what 0-100 means - if you are downloading a file then that is one thing but what if you need to call an api, fetch some data, process some data, call another api - what percentage is each section or api call? Users just want to know it is working.
100/n(API calls)
Users understand that 0-20 might take longer than 20-40
Re: Progress bars still lie
#184I don't see a problem here that needs solving as bad as the article suggests.
It's comforting to see something is happening and things are moving forward.
Re: Progress bars still lie
#185Progress bars are something that have been researched and iterated on for decades now, and the overall sentiment is pretty clear – users like seeing numbers go from zero to a hundred while they wait. It doesn't matter if they aren't always accurate. Replacing them with a static "processing" message would absolutely increase user confusion and dissatisfaction with loading times. A while ago we put in a lot of engineer…
I bet $100 Netflix does the same. From my "experiments" during outages, it seems to show you a timer based progression from 0-25% no matter what, while it waits for stuff to queue/load properly, then it takes off to 26-100% in short order. So when it Netflix is up, it slowly climbs 1-5% then rockets to 100% and plays. When it's slow, sometimes it goes to 15%, then rockets up. When it's down, it reaches 25% after 12.5…
It's actually representing the users patience level and reflecting that back at them like a mirror.
Re: Progress bars still lie
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen Google display progress bars showing that my page is loading, even when I've totally lost internet connection and I know it will never load. The progress bar goes as something like 1-e^-t, so it just asymptotically approaches 100% but never gets there. When it's that kind of lie, I don't think it's conveying any essential information.
The "system is not hung" signal is dead now due to modern platforms making sure that nothing happens on the UI thread. Now we get buttery smooth 60 fps spinners and loading bars, but if the thread doing the real work hangs, there's no indication.
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Re: Progress bars still lie
#187Apple seems to be worst at it. Try backing up your videos on iCloud and you can forget ever being able to watch them again...
Re: Progress bars still lie
#188>And yet, every single photo and video that I export from Dropbox finishes at 75%, regardless of how big the file is. What does he expect? That larger files go over 100%? Who knows how the progress bar is calculating, but the assumption that every file shouldn't finish at the same percentage just seems very odd.
I think you misunderstood - they finish at exactly 75%, which means it should be easy to make them all finish at 100% as they should.
There's an obvious explanation for why they finish at 75% though - to export a photo it presumably has to download it, and then do "something else" (maybe format conversion?). Measuring download progress is easy, but presumably the "something else" was more difficult to measure the progress on. Most libraries don't give progress feedback for most operations.
So the developer just thought "screw it, we'll allow 25% of the time for that processing". Based on the video they were wildly off but accurate progress bars are really low priority for a reason.
Re: Progress bars still lie
#189Progress bars are something that have been researched and iterated on for decades now, and the overall sentiment is pretty clear – users like seeing numbers go from zero to a hundred while they wait. It doesn't matter if they aren't always accurate. Replacing them with a static "processing" message would absolutely increase user confusion and dissatisfaction with loading times. A while ago we put in a lot of engineer…
I bet $100 Netflix does the same. From my "experiments" during outages, it seems to show you a timer based progression from 0-25% no matter what, while it waits for stuff to queue/load properly, then it takes off to 26-100% in short order. So when it Netflix is up, it slowly climbs 1-5% then rockets to 100% and plays. When it's slow, sometimes it goes to 15%, then rockets up. When it's down, it reaches 25% after 12.5…
Yea I've noticed that as well. If it stops on 25% then I know something is broken over at Netflix. If it stops at any other number then it's just something being slow, but will start eventually.
Re: Progress bars still lie
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's two issues here that are often wrapped up together: 1. what is the status of my task, and 2. did the computer get stuck If we could be sure the computer wouldn't get stuck (which is just a bug), then progress bars and spinners would be fine. If the task is as granular as you suggest, progress bars would be a great visual indicator, much better than text. But since computers do get stuck, additional in…
I'm so sick and tired of seeing spinners that keep spinning, even after the process failed; this is an epidemic in web apps, where failures are often a bit too graceful and application state is silently corrupted.
Maybe there should also be a "seconds since last progress update" counter. In case of a download it gets reset every time a new packet arrives.