As someone who has tried to make useful and accurate progress bars: fuck progress bars.

I saw a discussion once about how difficult the idea of an accurate progress bar really is. Note how so many things now take the easier approach of a circular or other shape that shows activity without being tied to any particular time prediction. My preference is a combo progress bar with actual throughput numbers/graph, so you can tell if there’s really progress or some bottleneck that will make it longer.

Progress bar Dummy bar

Love how my heartrate sped up as soon as the three dots animation started to slow down …