[IxDA Discuss] the appearance of change

[Jim Drew]

Except that it may tell you no such thing.  All it tells you is that the process filling the meter hasn't locked; there may be zero connection to reality behind the scenes.

The project I work on has two faked progress meters.  One occurs in a login scenario and appears to be a marker of how much is done, but once it fills all the way, it empties and starts to refill.  (Which tells the user: "Ha!  Psyche!  This could take forever, and you'll never know if we're actually doing anything!")  Another one downloads as update and counts by %... or rather, shows % but counts time, so once if it gets to 100% (because of a server connection issue), it just continues to spin.

(And then there was the one meter I saw a few years back that would count up to like 120%.  Either it was also actually counting time spent, and reflected a bad estimate on someone's part, or they later added more stuff for it to do and didn't recalibrate.  Really freaky.)

-- Jim


-----Original Message-----
>From: Tracy Boyington <tracy_boyington at okcareertech.org>
>
>As long as its animated, even a "fudged" progress bar tells me that my
>computer has not locked up. That's really all I ask for.
>
>>>> Michael Tuminello <mt at motiontek.com> 1/1/2008 6:48 PM >>>
>A good general example of this in software design would be progress  
>bars.  Some are in fact accurate but many are fudged to some degree  
>or other, and in that case they are just a design element that has  
>been produced to elicit the desired response (patience) from the user.