The Progress Indicator

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Are you making progress while programming your progress indicator? Do you also hate the annoyance of badly developed progress indicators - the dreaded progress bar which indicates absolutely no progress at all, the so called indeterminate progress bar?  

Some relevant reading links:

• The progress bar, the lie we all accept (Steve Teixeira's blog, April 2007)
• Rethinking the Progress Bar (Chris Harrison, October 2007)
• When writing code means you've failed (Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror blog, April 2005)

Guidelines:

• Response Time: The Three Important Limits (Jacob Nielsen)
• Progress Bar  (Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines)
• Progress Indicators  (Sun Web Application Guidelines)
• Progress Indicators (Apple Human Interface)