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Comment by Talyen42 | Hacker News Reader

It's also obvious to many users when a progress bar is "faking" progress, stalled, or clearly not representing the actual progress being made.

This makes me mad at your app, and very slightly less likely to use your software.

Good luck measuring my slight disdain.

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Is it actually obvious though?

Often, yes. A progress bar that hangs at 99% for 50+% of the elapsed time teaches the user not to trust the bar.

It sometimes depends on what progress the bar is tracking. I think some developers (incorrectly) track the % of the actions they are completing EG I have 100 files of different sizes to load and I have loaded 45 of them whereas I think users always expect the progress bar to be a timer and progress smoothly from 0 to "done".

Like in many cases in which a programmer codes a user-facing piece of software (be it this, an error message, etc.), the programmer tells what he's doing instead of what the user cares about.

For various reasons it may not be practicable to get a more proportional display unless you just fudge it.

See the search bar in explorer.exe in its Windows Vista iteration, when searching over non-indexed content. Way to completely break my suspension of disbelief.

But those are the honest ones!

Agreed. Elsewhere I’ve seen a separate study recommending to artificially slow down the bar in the beginning in order to give it an opportunity to accelerate near the end.

I can see how that'd be helpful, but it's essentially the opposite of what the root comment is saying.

Exactly. Honest (but poorly implemented) bars teach users not to trust them. This is because the time estimation they are attempting is inherently hard. Many kinds of computation cannot be estimated without actually performing the computation.

Yet, users want progress bars anyway. Without an apparent, finite timeline, they get frustrated and angry quickly. Thus the conflict.

So, the recommendation I’ve seen is 1) work very hard to get as smooth and linear if a bar as you can. And 2) fudge the numbers to give it a bit of acceleration to counter the user’s decreasing patience.

Yeah, I agree with you.

Sooo Microsoft time™.

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