I remember my first progress bar. “That’s pretty neat,” I said, looking at the screen. As a file loaded, a little thermometer filled up. I watched in awe as time passed, the animation entertained me, and the process eventually finished. I was impressed.
Of course, the progress bar was a joke.
Progress bars have been around a long time. I have no idea who thought of them, but it was obviously some genius who recognized and addressed two frustrating computer issues:
1. People don’t like to sit and wait while they use a computer.
2. People often wonder whether the computer is busy or dead.
The first progress bar I remember seeing was in what us compugeezers called a “modem program.”
Back in the old days, you’d use your computer, a modem, and the phone line to connect to another computer with a modem and a phone line. Normally for a file transfer, you’d sit and wait. If you had an outboard (external) modem, you could watch the little lights flash, which would assure you that the file transfer was taking place. The screen was still. You would wait.
Eventually, the modem programs displayed a percentage for the file being downloaded. It was a countdown: 90% left, 80% left, and so on. Then there was the bogus “Time remaining,” which was accompanied by the text, “Time remaining value calculated based on best speed.” It was actually pretty accurate.
When Windows transformed the PC from a text-based environment to a graphical one, the progress bar became less informative and more pretty. It was basically a thermometer. Sometimes it would have the “time left” calculation, but mostly it didn’t.
Figure 1. Nothing is being loaded. This is a GIF image, constantly looping.
Of course, the assumption is that something is actually happening, that some internal task is taking place that motivates the progress bar to update. Sometimes that’s true, but mostly it isn’t.
In fact, the best progress presentation I like is the Unix/Linux scrolling text screen. You can’t even read what the text is saying it scrolls by so fast, but yet it serves both purposes I stated above: It gives you something to do while you’re waiting and it confirms that the computer is actually working and not hung up.
The worst progress bars are the animated beach balls. They tell you nothing. Even the little spiny doodads that adorn a web browser are useless. Yes, I can see that the page is loading, but the spiny graphical dingus doesn’t tell me whether or not any information is actually being received.
Some programs do bless you with an option to view Details. I like that. The setting lets me see data transferred or steps being taking to install a program. That information helps when I’m curious as to why something is taking so long, and I can dismiss it when I need to work on something else. But to believe that some animation is actually telling you the truth about whether something is working or not, well, that’s just a myth.
