Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 5th Mar 2008 21:02 UTC, submitted by irbis
"Most software packages employ progress bars to visualize the status of an ongoing process. Users rely on progress bars to verify that an operation is proceeding successfully and to estimate its completion time. Typically, a linear function is applied such that the advancement of a progress bar is directly proportional to the amount of work that has been completed. However, estimating progress can be difficult for complex or multi-stage processes. Varying disk, memory, processor, bandwidth and other factors complicate this further. Consequently, progress bars often exhibit non-linear behaviors, such as acceleration, deceleration, and pauses. Furthermore, humans do not perceive the passage of time in a linear way. This, coupled with the irregular behavior of progress bars, produces a highly variable perception of how long it takes progress bars to complete. An understanding of which behaviors perceptually shorten or lengthen process duration can be used to engineer a progress bar that appears faster, even though the actual duration remains unchanged. This paper describes an experiment that sought to identify patterns in user perception of progress bar behavior."
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Member since:
2005-07-08
It might actually be rather difficult to choose one general best way to to visualize the status of an ongoing processes that would suit all kinds of processes, users and situations as well. I suppose that personally I would usually prefer to see more information about processes than just some simple graphical progress bar - how ever well designed it might be.
Operating system booting process is often visualized by showing a simple progress bar too, like in Ubuntu and MS Windows. But what if there are problems in the booting process? How much information can a very simple graphical progress bar give of complicated processes?
If I take Ubuntu as an example, I tended to like the older Ubuntu Dapper Drake version graphical boot screen better than the new supposedly all graphical boot screen. The new version seems not to work very well as it constantly changes back to a pure text mode all too often, although it is not supposed to do so in theory. The old Dapper version of the Ubuntu boot screen was better - in my opinion - as it combined both a visual progress bar and some simplified textual boot information scrolling on the screen. Enough information but not about non-essential details.