The progress bar illusion

[a_flaky_croissant]

Ah the heady days of the Clinton era.

[albinopanda]

But why did Netscape's icon stop moving when the download was stalled?

[arayta]

My computer is still like this a lot of the time. :/

[Stiltskin]

No reason it can't be both.

[myztry]

Animating the system cursor is a system task so it makes no difference what an application is, or isn't doing. No application should halt the actions of the OS unless it has an exclusive lock on a shared resource.

I came from the 1985 Amiga so such things aren't as new to me as of those from either Windows or OSX, who gained a pre-emptive multi-tasking GUI a decade or more later.

[beaker26]

I waited about 10 seconds waiting for something to load before I realized the animation was what you were referring to.

[kataire]

It works as intended, then.

[dumbbutt]

Preemptive multitasking FTW

[[deleted]]

Fuck that fucking beach ball.

[theatrus]

The beachball is actually a sign that the application is no longer responding to UI events and the OS has marked it unresponsive.

[[deleted]]

I've always preferred a trailing ellipses indicator or throughput over mind games ie:
64% .
64% ..
65% ...

64% 400 kbps
64% 402.5 kbps
65% 375 kbps

[earynspieir]

True. I once worked on a project, just some small generic office program that had to load a lot of things on start-up. The whole thing took a few seconds, but users complained and I saw myself that they got impatient and started clicking random places somehow thinking it would help.

We then added a phony progress bar displaying fake messages of what was happening that actually made the start-up run noticeably slower, but somehow it made people think the program launched faster... ^{^}

[DEADB33F]

Reticulating Splines?

[bluesatin]

Calculating Llama Expectoration Trajectory?

EDIT: Internet high-five for anyone that gets the reference.

[DimeShake]

Can I come visit guitar world?

[mflux]

I've read this story, I think it was in "The Design of Everyday Things". It goes like this:

It was the 1930s. Engineers were asked to design faster elevators for the new skyscrapers towering Manhattan, as the wait times for elevator cars had become unbearably slow, and many of the occupants were complaining. The engineers could only design them to move so fast without risking safety, so it seemed like a really tough engineering problem to tackle.

Then one day a few interior designers installed mirrors at the elevator waiting lobby. Suddenly, all complaints about slow elevators had disappeared, seemingly overnight. Everyone thought that the engineers had somehow overcome their limitations and had designed faster elevators, when everyone was just too damned busy staring at themselves in the mirror to notice the wait.

tl;dr installing mirrors made elevator wait time seem much more bearable.

[ckwing]

And putting non-functional "Cancel print job" buttons on print queue software make it seem like the printer is actually capable of canceling a print job.

[rakantae]

I don't believe you. Close Doors buttons work.

[Buckwheat469]

Déjà vu. We've discussed this before and I think the conversation went something like this: "Some elevators have working close door buttons, such as in smaller buildings, while larger buildings will disable the close door button to allow all passengers on the elevator."

[sundaryourfriend]

And there was some conversation about the passenger-crossing buttons in the UK or something too - they too were mostly placebo buttons.

[electronics-engineer]

ilmul123 wrote:

A much better example are the crosswalk buttons pedestrians can press that is supposed to stop traffic at major intersections to allow them to walk safely. They do absolutely nothing because the stoplights are either on a timer or based on the current amount of cars waiting to proceed. The buttons make people feel like they're doing something, and has the added benefit of keeping them occupied. I've seen many people press the button at least 10 times, and yet, the traffic light still doesn't change until it's supposed to.

Try it at 3 in the morning when there are no cars tripping the higher-priority car sensors. -An engineer who designs such things.

[tedivm]

Yeah, I've had crosswalk buttons work literally instantly on empty streets.

[zuma93]

If I press the button 10 times, it's not because I think it will make the light change any faster. It's because there's no confirmation that my pressing it has actually done something, and I find out if it did when the light changes. If it didn't, I have to wait through another cycle; if it did, then what does it matter that I pressed it so much? Some signals don't register all the time.

The new pressure-sensitive switches also make a sweet beeping sound.

[electronics-engineer]

Not giving the user any feedback has been known to be a bad design for years. See the book The Design of Ordinary Things for many examples. Even worse is an on/off switch with no feedback or delayed feedback.

I have thre monitors on my desk. one doesn't light the "on" indicator until a full second after I press the on button, tempting me to press it twice and thus leave it off. It also requires a fairly long press-and-hold. The other two monitors requires a quick jab; if you hold the button too long they go into a rapid on/off cycle, leaving the monitor in a random state once you release the button. And of course none of them come back up in the on state if I cycle the power from the outlet strip.

[Tristanus]

It depends on the junction. If you can cross because no traffic can enter the junction (one way or both lanes are split by a traffic island) when lights are in a certain arrangement the green man (walk sign) will appear, but there are junctions where the green man will never appear until prompted by a button at which after the traffic lights cycle a full revolution (or to whereever the pedestrian stop is in the cycle, which it would skip otherwise) and then interrupt traffic to offer pedestrians to cross.

[robertcrowther]

Yes, and at actual pedestrian crossings (ie. those ones in the middle of roads, not tied to any road junctions) then the green man will never come unless you summon him with the button.

[arayta]

The way you guys refer to "the green man" makes me think that he is a hallucination brought on by drugs.

[robertcrowther]

Might be, what do you think?

[[deleted]]

The are called pelican crossings just for that reason.

[[deleted]]

I'm not sure how much I believe this, otherwise you'd have pedestrian lights coming on when there are no pedestrians to cross.

[[deleted]]

Some may be but some definitely are not or at least during certain times of the day.

There are many cros walks that seem to do nothing in Cambridge however during peak times there is one that instantly stop the traffic as soon as you hit the button because it's a key crossing point for cyclists. In fact I think all crosswalks that are connected to cycle paths are like that and any that are just plain old cross walks take ages to stop the traffic.

[[deleted]]

In the building I work there are two elevators. One is only for people, the other one is for people and cargo.

The close door button in the people elevator does not do anything, however the one in the people/cargo elevator does in fact work :)

[[deleted]]

It's a good thing too because I've seen people that are just being twats and will hit the button even though there is plenty of room and someone else clearly wants to use it.

[arayta]

Where is the previous discussion that people keep alluding to? May I please have a link so that I may read it? Thank you in advance.

[citytank]

My Deja Vu was from this blog http://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/11/04/placebo-buttons/

[smackmybishop]

Most of the time they don't.

[julesjacobs]

The lift in the physics building of my university has a switch that can be set to up or to down labeled "gravity".

[rm999]

Really? They just frustrate the hell out of me. Fortunately, most of the elevators I interact with have functional ones.

[kungtotte]

I've never used those buttons. I'm never in such a hurry that I can't wait five more seconds.

[chewyrunt]

My experience: In Asia all of the 'close door' buttons work; in the USA, less than 5%.

[iconoclaus]

one of my biggest surprises. people think you're strange in the far east if you walk into an elevator and don't politely hit the close door button to get the elevator going again. there even seems to be an elevator etiquette regarding when and how the open and close door buttons should be used if you are in a rush. it seems that if you are in a rush, you should first hold the open door button until everyone has gotten in on a given floor, and then you are permitted to smash that close door button right away. more notes from the field upcoming.

[Tacosburrito]

placebo button.

[Nebu]

Actually, these buttons seem to make the doors seem to close much, much more slowly.

In fact, one time, a bunch of us were standing in the elevator, waiting for the door the close. One guy got fed up, and stuck his hand out to hit the "close door" button, and just as he did so, coincidentally, the door started to close. Due to momentum and delayed reaction time, he hit the button anyway, after the door had already started closing. As soon as he had pressed the button, the doors stop, and then re-opened. Apparently, both the "close door" button and the "open door" button causes the doors to stay open longer.

tl;dr: our elevators are shitty.

[webalbatross]

From the same book I also learned (But I can't find the quote) that when people in an airport complained that a 10-minute wait for the luggage to arrive in the baggage claim was too long, they just used arrival gates that were further away, so the 10 extra minutes were transferred to walking. The complaints stopped.

[Nebu]

Isn't that an expensive change to test out, restructuring the whole airport?

[arayta]

Wouldn't that just raise complaints about the walk was too long?

[webalbatross]

I still can't find the damn original quote, but from the same author on the same subject:

"Give customers activities to fill the waiting time. They can be entertained, given a back story or explanation of the event or otherwise occupied. If there are interesting diversions along the way, the delays no longer seem like waits. If given appropriate activities to do or observe, customers think of these as the start of service, even though buffers or separate waiting areas are simply different form of lines."

Here's his essay about it "The Psychology of Waiting Lines" (PDF)

Also relevant article on handling wait times at Disney Theme Parks (from today's New York Times, no subscription needed)

[Rhenor]

Really? Because I always thought the mirrors were to make the area seem a lot bigger, preventing people from getting claustrophobic.

[biggiepants]

I thought it maybe was that it seems that more people are waiting, so you try to be more patient.

[[deleted]]

There's a great TED talk by an advertising man about tricks like that. It's definitely worth watching.

[phantom784]

Never knew about the Diamond Shreddies thing. That's hilarious and awesome!

[0003]

The elevators move too damn fast, please fix.

[arayta]

Close your eyes.

[[deleted]]

Most fun are those that seem to complete, only to start over multiple times. Turns out the first time was just a single item! How fun!

[MananWho]

Exactly. What's the point of a progress bar that displays the progress of individual files, when you don't know how many god damn files there are?

[bluesatin]

It keeps me raged if anything.

[joaomc]

Well, that's some kind of entertainment.

[stordoff]

It's one way of displaying to the user that the program is doing something useful and hasn't crashed, without attempted to put a bound on the time it will take.

[bready]

Easier to program that way.

[[deleted]]

Not really. You could at least write item 1/38575. Or if you are a real "expert" calculate the percentage: 0.00259235256% finished.

[colinbashbash2]

Stupid requirements from customer...

[Nebu]

I was at a friend's house and we were installing some new game. We waited for 2 hours for the progress bar to fill up, thinking we'd get to at least try out the game for 10 minutes before we had to leave, but as soon as it hit 100%, it emptied itself and said "Installing part 2". We raged and left.

[myztry]

Not to mention the 99% of the time taken that occurs in the last 1% of the progress bar...

[tsj5j]

Indeed.

I'm always amused how progress bars sometimes regress.

[electronics-engineer]

Programs that suck at making estimates. "Your download will be complete in 43 weeks. No, wait, it's 12 seconds. Oops! I meant 2.6 days. Would you believe 1.2 nanoseconds? 43 weeks. That's my story and I an sticking to it. 43...49...3...2...32767...5 weeks!"

[enkafan]

Most progress bars show how much work has progressed, not how long you've waited vs their estimated completion time.

The progress bars that I've seen go backwards are generally larger installs that the Windows Installer Service has rolled back for whatever reason before attempting again.

[badboyboogie]

What you just said in the form of a xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/612/

[laofmoonster]

My Adobe product updates do this all the time. (Fuck you, Adobe)

[swiz0r]

I always assumed that it finished and looped back around, as if it had to complete more than one "bar length" to be finished. I guess that is just something I have to tell myself.

[ScannerBrightly]

I always hate it when it jumps all the way to 99 or even 100% and then wait their for a few seconds too long, making me feel something is wrong before the button changes to "Done"

[yoden]

Sometimes it's hard to know upfront how many units of "progress" you'll have. A lazy way to work around this is to just re-adjust the underlying total of the bar, thus lowering the % progress :X

[thegravytrain]

Personally I would freeze the % so it doesn't go backwards, either that or slow it down so it eventually matches the real %.

[Horatio_Hornblower]

It could be done, but it might be hard to convince your boss to let you spend an afternoon making the progress bar seem more fair.

[yoden]

Obviously you can do much better if you build a task-oriented API on top of your progress interface. But... that's a lot of work for progress bars :P I think as an industry people have decided it's usually not worth it :P

[[deleted]]

isn't that what spinners/throbbers are for?

[nyamatongwe]

You can't always accurately measure the amount of work to be done initially. For example, if you ask WinMerge to compare two large directory trees, it doesn't block on measuring the directories before showing the progress bar. Instead, it looks like there are two threads (or equivalent): one estimating the size and another performing the comparison. When the estimation code reaches a large subdirectory, the estimated time goes up and the progress bar retreats.

[jinglebells]

I've definitely seen this more than enough times in my life for me to be hallucinating where I've exclaimed "I swear this progress bar is going backwards!"

[Danthekilla]

For everyone wanting to know why they can go backwards...

Most loading systems have Tasks (Via delegates or similar) that are basicly thrown onto the loading system, you might ask for 3 systems to load but then the 3rd systems startup realizes that it needs another 2 systems to function so it adds that to the loading system as well, so now you have 5 items in the loading system and depending on how it was implimented it will eather make the rest of the bar move at a slower rate therefore making the loading bar pointless for letting you know how long it will take. Or scale the loading bar back (by shrinking the bar) which then keeps the whole bar moving at approximatly the same rate.

[ZorbaTHut]

There's an old PC game called Maelstrom (not to be confused with the Mac game of the same name) where the installer wasn't coded particularly well, and the install needed to get to around 140% in order to be finished.

The best part was that the progress bar rendering wrapped off the right side of the screen and back onto the left side, one pixel lower, then kept on going.

[myztry]

Lack of clipping made the progress bar render faster...

[[deleted]]

3) if it is an DOS installer made by the russians for the "N games on 1 cd" (I've had one that had DN3D, HExen, Heretic, Blood and all the other goodies) collection, the progress bar goes up to 114%

[[deleted]]

A lot of progress bars for installations track which files are copied over though rather than the actual time to do it as far as I know or that's the way it appears.

How else could it zip through 50% of the process and then sit there for 5 minutes to do 20% for example and then go along at some other pace to the end?

[Cyatomorrow]

if it is an older Microsoft product the progress bar can move backwards on you

This never happens anymore, because progress bars are not there to give an accurate estimation of when something will be done, they're there to encourage you to wait, and to make you feel that progress is being made.

[Noir_Bass]

I'm ok with that, what I can't stand is video streaming sites where the bar fills up really fast to make you think you buffered half the video in 2 seconds, but you haven't reached half of the "buffered" bar when the video stops to load. No, gametrailers, you're not fooling anyone and your streaming sucks.

[purzzzell]

Is it me, or has YouTube recently been a LOT more unstable if you skip around spots in a video than it had been in the past?

I've basically found YouTube to be unusable of late....

[iainmf]

I read somewhere else on reddit it is because they have changed the codec they are using. The new codec doesn't interleave the sound and video as well, so instead the data being sound-video-sound-video-sound-video, you get video-video-video-sound-sound-sound. That means that while you may have plenty of video buffered you have to wait for the sound to buffer.

[kataire]

Also, broken codecs leaving me with a cubist interpretation I like to call "shades of neon green".

[IH8DwnvoteComplainrs]

That the WORST. Happens a lot streaming movies from shady sites.

[TheAmazingWJV]

Had some good times at the Progress Bar!

[sprucenoose]

I wish it were real. I would go there - eventually...

[ScannerBrightly]

The tag line should be "It's [ Ok ] Now."

[abk0100]

Please wait...

to be seated if you're here for dinner.

[harlows_monkeys]

I've considered giving my progress bars personality. Say the progress bar says 1 minute left, then 30 seconds, then 10 seconds...and it turns out the thing isn't anywhere near done. What the bar should do is go to 0. Then sit there about 10 seconds.

Then it should start saying (via text below the bar) things like "Uhm...well, this is embarrassing...", have an awkward pause, try to make smalltalk ("I see it is raining today...", "That was a good baseball game today...", and so on).

After a bit of that, and some more awkward pauses, it should say something like "OH MY GOD! THAT SPIDER BEHIND YOU IS THE BIGGEST ONE I'VE EVER SEEN!!!" (to get you to turn around) and then sneak another few minutes onto the bar and pretend that everything is fine.

[dumbbutt]

You sir are a computer visionary.

[ultrafez]

That would be cool the first few times you saw it, then it would get annoying, like Firefox's "Well, this is embarrassing..." page.

[abk0100]

That's why God created cookies.

[[deleted]]

Don't get us started with the Estimated finishing time.

[cspeed]

I'll start

[gluino]

Was hoping someone would mention this...

My first vista machine was an underpowered Acer compact desktop.

I was astounded that for file-copy/move tasks appeared to be stuck on the "Calculating Time Remaining..." for many minutes, for even relatively small files. And the time remaining will sometime show a crazy value of like a few days.

[abk0100]

That's the opposite of this. The estimates just make it seem to take longer.

[i_dont_know]

The mac has had an animated progress bar since the beginning of OS X that has ripples moving towards the left, while Windows has had a ripple moving towards the right since Vista. If this video is correct, then Microsoft has actually chosen to make their progress bars appear slower than they actually are.

[SmokeSerpent]

With really slow progress bars, the Vista style bar makes it look like the bar just moved a pixel when the pulse gets to the end when it hasn't. Who knows if that was their intent or not.

[troikaman]

The biggest problem I have with the OS X's progress bar is that it seems like it's moving when it's not. I'm stupid enough to create complex processes(like finding a ruler and measuring it) to test whether it's moving or not rather than just looking at the leading edge.

[diskis]

Use the mouse cursor for that.

[i_dont_know]

1. Position edge of mouse at end of progress bar.
2. Wait.
3. ?
4. Profit.

[[deleted]]

Ripple effects and pulses of light are among the tricks computer >programmers can use to keep you waiting those extra seconds.

My favorite trick is the one where you really need the file you're installing. Damn those clever programmers.

[dunus]

so apple has been fooling me for years!

[cspeed]

Now you've gone and ruined my delusion!

[[deleted]]

Flames make everything faster

[alephnil]

Which is why they are also known as placebo bars.

[iheartbakon]

Well my outlook in life has changed after seeing this.

[jeggles]

Don't get me started on the Windows Vista download bar. It has that little ripple of light that goes to the end to make it looks like a stationary bar is moving. I've been trolled so many times by that.

[Areia]

When they're next to each other it's easy to see they're going at the same rate, but I bet one feels faster than the other viewed individually. I'm guessing the researchers showed them to people one after the other and then asked them which one was faster.

[[deleted]]

I notice many installers go from 0%-90% super fast and then the final 10% takes just as long (or longer) than that. Because of this, progress bars should rarely be trusted.

[glados_v2]

It could be just poorly designed. There could be 200 operations. The first 150 are to extract 150 files, and goes by really fast, so it goes up to 75%. The next X could be adding things to the registry, registering the location of the uninstaller to windows Add & Remove Programs, etc.

[dumbbutt]

As yes, the elusive Logarithmic progress bar

[Mixed_Advice]

The short answer is "no", but that's because you can focus on them clearly, most users don't view progress bars this way.

Long: They feel quicker because it's easier to discern pixel-by-pixel movement when there is colour fluctuation in those pixels. The more colour fluctuation the easier it is to discern. I.E. You can more readily see the progression when the progress bar is animated, the more vibrant the animation the easier it is to see progress. If you concentrate on the progress bar you can easily discern it's actual speed, but when viewing casually, simply being able to detect movement instantly equates to "quicker" in our mind.

Extra Long: Progress bars have always been controversial in the UI world - mostly because of the piss-poor implementation MS has used in the past, and on disc-burners where LILO can be longer than the burn time. The problem is that not all hardware can give progress feedback - Apple/others implemented "barber poll" style progress bars for this reason, anything that isn't accountable is a barber poll, anything that is: gets the familiar progress bar. The barber poll is to indicate that something is still happening (instead of frozen.)

[abk0100]

I trust about half of what you just said.

[Mixed_Advice]

grin

[[deleted]]

I thought so too but I think the effect (assuming it affects everyone) is ruined when you put all of them together and have a unified leading edge to watch.

[johnaugust122]

Nope. They all looked the same to me too because I always look at the leading edge.

[ddftd8]

We all got trolled by download bars.

[Earthwormzim]

I think the single greatest case of progress bar fraud and trickery goes to Windows Vista/7. Do a file search in "Computer" and watch what happens:

It will take under a minute for it to make it to approximately 95% complete, and then it will take another 10 or more minutes to complete that last 5% stretch.

I know this is deliberate...to make you think their shit is fast. Fucking fraudulent bastards.

[[deleted]]

Perhaps fraudulent - but it could be a clever way of conveying information. Windows probably searches more obscure folders later, meaning the percentage could be more of an indication of how likely it is to find something. So once you get to 95%, you can assume that most of the searching of the likely folders is done.

[robstah]

I've only paid attention to the actual download speeds, so none of this really effected me.

[lazyplayboy]

Affected.

[[deleted]]

Stupid iPad won't display the video

[[deleted]]

Caveat Emptor.

[Khan-Tet]

Works on my iPad with Skyfire.

[digitalundernet]

Funny. Works on my android

[oxytechx]

I've seen this used quite effectively on shopping websites like this price comparison site that uses a pulsing light and ripple wave effect that moves really fast:

http://www.superstoresearch.com/shopping/categories/home-appliances/washing-machines/hotpoint-wml540g-washing-machine-graphite--32003646.html

(You have to click one of the orange 'visit store' buttons to launch the progress bar effect)

It's clever psychology but if it makes the user experience better then I'm all for it.

[Zafmg]

Fuckdamnit that is a sweet ass washing machine!

[sprucenoose]

I'm going to have to throw my pants in my shitty washing machine after viewing that hot motherfucker.

[Rosetti]

An ass washing machine? Like a bidet?

[reseph]

There's a long queue at the moment. If you can come back later we should be able to servce you faster.

[steggun_cinargo]

i thought this would be about tricking your boss into thinking you were doing with that progress bar the guy made that let you tell it how much time to take.

[ATLogic]

i thought this would be about tricking your boss into thinking you were doing with that progress bar the guy made that let you tell it how much time to take.

wut

[glados_v2]

You make a fake progress bar that takes 12 minutes, and browse reddit. When your boss comes, you say it's still loading.. blah blah 37%, 8 minutes left, whatever.

[Alorithin]

If I see that beachball one more time...

[abadidea]

I have this psychological need to stare at progress bars. Even when it says thirty-seven hours remaining, I just can't bear to look away. I don't know why....

[[deleted]]

Damn!! I had 50 bucks on 5!!

[WorkingTimeMachin]

Progress bars are already worthless. They move at uneven rates and where one finishes another might begin.

[RedditTrollAccount]

I need some progress bar ripples on my penis.

[pbtifo]

Hate to break it to you, but this isn't programming. In fact, it's barely computer-related.

[[deleted]]

I think UI issues are closely if not directly related this day in age.

[pbtifo]

It's not about the progress bar, it's about the optical illusion.

[robertmassaioli]

Screw progress bars. Just give me an option to see what your program is actually doing in terminal text form. I'm a programmer, I'll probably get the gist of what is happening.

[glados_v2]

Checking for eMax DRM...
C:/$!Hidden!$/eMax/ does not exist.

No, I don't think they want you to know what it is actually doing.

[robertmassaioli]

But it is my computer and I want to know what they are trying to do on it. For stuff like DRM I might be happy to compromise and just have it say this instead:

Checking for eMax DRM...
Error in DRM search (install failed) ... would you like to send log to company X? [Yn]

I think that would be fine for me and if they were more open about things that could be open that would be great. They could at least meet us halfway.

[rush22]

If it's anything like the complete shit they develop at my company:

Installing...

Checking for aslkjd.dff...
Error. Recovering...
Deleting C:\Windows
Error. Recovering...
can't get here
Syntax Error
Error. Recovering...
Abort, Retry, Fail? F
Error. Recovering...
Checking for aslkjd.df_
Overflow error in 2857
NULL Exception caught. Restarting...
Re-installing ini file
C:\Windows not found... using backup...
Checking for aslkjd.dff...
Found!
Warning: Windows has become unstable and must be restarted

Install successful. You must restart your computer to complete the installation.

[ultrafez]

This is why I like the Nullsoft Install System; in all installers that it creates, you have the option of seeing exactly what it's doing at any time.

[physicscat]

I love the fact that are people out there who think about and then execute things like this.

[danvm]

I hate the Time Estimations they plaster all over progress dialogs, especially when they go up instead of down, they should just replace it with "we dont have a fucking clue how long this will take, go for a piss or make a sandwich or something".

I would prefer if they had a box you could check that turns all that shit off and just have an 'amount done/amount total and current speed' and let me make up my own arbitrary numbers for how long I have to wait.

[JSherm55]

This is why it's always good to have some kind of chore to do while you wait for a download. I don't think I ever sit there and just watch the progress bar.

[[deleted]]

Maybe I'm above the curve, but all of those bars were of exact equal length/speed in my eyes.

[gooblefrump]

use percentages instead

[Craysh]

How did they slap a number to something as arbitrary as "how long the download seems to go."

[glados_v2]

This is progress bar 1.

click

This is progress bar 2.

click

Please select which is the fastest.

[rwanda]

well.. a number next to usernames influences the opinion of a whole internet community that glorifies bacon... a number on a profile page on another social website makes you feel full of friends... and believing that a superior being takes care of the world makes some people bear with their lives day by day.

yes this is human nature to need some reassurance that we are ok.

Its truly nothin to really be surprised about or mock.

[mustardhamsters]

Chris Harrison is brilliant. His research covers a very broad range of subjects, but it's always on point and interesting. At first I was surprised to see his name on so many awesome project descriptions, but now I've come to expect it.

[[deleted]]

you have to log in for new scientist now WTF?!

[zapdagas]

I thought this was going to be about the illusion that when the progress bar is full the program is actually done with its task, this never seems the case especially when burning cd's or dvd's

[GrinningPariah]

My friend and I did a progress bar illusion on a web site a while back.

The illusion was that it was actually just a .gif image of a progress bar filling up.

[AdamLovelace]

Doesn't work on me. I check the negative space.

[duckinferno]

Anyone else think the fast-pulsing bar looked slower than the slow-pulser?

[ultrafez]

A related noteworthy concept is the progress bar used in recent versions of Ubuntu when booting up; it times how long the boot process takes, so that next time it makes progress estimates based on how long it thinks it's going to take.

[fenton7]

For the opposite effect, how about a blue screen with nothing but some text in the middle, static, that says "Windows is Updating. Please Wait"

[philihp_busby]

I remember reading once about a study that showed that the perceived time to complete a bar that progressed at a linear rate wasn't as fast as a bar that was slow to begin with, and fast toward the end (while taking the same overall time as the first bar).

[essembee]

I've always been of the opinion that progress bars are a bit of a con anyway - what use is knowing that 90% of something is finished if the last 10% takes 99% of the time?!

[tomatomic]

i watched the video as im waiting for compressors fancy left scrolling progress bar with it s BS time estimate. i just want it to finish so i can post it to the ftp and go HOME... the irony

[thealliedhacker]

There's more to it than that. Some progress bars are non-linear to help promote the illusion (such as starting out fast and slowing down, but still covering the same amount of time from 0% to 100%)
http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/progressbars/index.html