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there was a This American Life about the progress bar
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.
A progress bar isn’t generally hard.
What is hard is making it move smoothly while still only incrementing and getting the correct time. But I don’t think there’s a single person that still cares about smoothness except for the very extreme cases. By now, everybody has learned they don’t work that way.
Anyway, about those extreme cases, just avoid filling the bar up to 99% on the first 10 seconds and leaving it there for the next 2 hours. Just do that and you’ll be already better than Microsoft, so nobody will complain.
Love how my heartrate sped up as soon as the three dots animation started to slow down …
Progress barDummy bar
