Abort Bars: A Suggested Improvement to Progress Bars

breckyunits.com

31 points·thunderbong··4 comments

I like the idea of focusing on the key notion of wether the task will succeed or not. A challenge in these things are to design things such that users understand what is communicated, and you also want something that fits the style of the app overall.

Personally I'm a fan of progress bars that indicates actual progress rather than any estimates the developer though would be good to provide. But if getting-stuck probability could be hinted at it would be great.

Maybe, whenever the bar gets stuck, it can slowly start greying out based on the probability that it's completely dead? That way an attentive user can use this as a clue for when to reload and try again, while not breaking the previous behaviour or introducing too much confusing information.

Although I like the idea, isn't a hung progress bar an indicator of a bad implementation in the first place? I think a good program should check whether progress is still being made and inform the user or self abort.

Good idea. Sometime back, you could hear from the sound of your floppy if something was hung. Or from the HDD LED. (Of course only for processes involving the disk).

> So I saw a lot of animated "progress" bars in software that was actually hung.

That is indeed a scourge. It is not easy to solve since sometimes you have to wait for a server to respond which in the proposed solution would show “nothing’s happening”.

Seems like if there were serious desire one could create user friendly messages in these situations. Like an indication of the step it's hanging on and/or what it's doing. I've seen goofs like the Sims and technical messages, but scant few user directed messages.

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