Once upon a time slow connections begat the Progress Bar - bloated sites would taunt us with '15% loaded' screens. High-speed promised to kill the beast and free us from their tyranny but yet it lives! Progress bars are being used MORE lately to direct user actions. Look to Farmville and LinkedIn which push their users to collect 100% of their personal information. Incomplete progress bars are an itch that needs to be scratched. They carry the implicit language that declares 'You are here' but more importantly 'The end is in sight'. Game design motivates us through incremental, measurable progress towards a tangible goal but is this the way real life works? Is the progress bar's ubiquity in technology starting to affect the way we measure progress in meatspace? This panel will reach far across time and space to look at the story of progress bars, why they hypnotize us and what we need to do - slay the beast once and for all, or throw ourselves into its partially-complete embrace...
32. A progress bar is a black box They are good at making hidden processes understandable
33. Black boxes in our lives Airport Delays Waiting Rooms Postal Service Traffic Lights Oven Timers Retirement Savings
34. Will Progress Bars exist in our future? Moore's law is making black boxes invisible Shift now from machine-focus to people-focus
35. We're not good at quantifying everything. We're unpredictable. We don't always know when things are complete. People break The Commandments
36. (The last 30% is really the only part that counts) It's not always quantity. Sometimes it's about quality. Jacket Shoes Socks Necktie Belt Dress Shirt Watch T-Shirt Pants Underwear
37. To achieve 100% completion Questions? Let me know what you thought Reach me @stitchmedia www.stitchmedia.ca Thanks to: Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon Many others who discussed these ideas
In fact the earliest progress bars were called thermometers when the metaphor moved to computers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_clock http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Kerzenuhr.jpg The most famous candle clock was invented by King Alfred the Great of England in 878. King Alfred created a device that utilized six candles. The candles were made from 72 pennyweights of wax and were each 12 inch tall and of equal thickness. Each candle had 12 one-inch markings which represented a block of time and burned away in four hours. The candles were placed in wooden cases with transparent horn panels. King Alfred used his candle clock to organize the time he spent on monarchy duties, prayer and study. Read more at Suite101: Candle Clocks: An Early Method of Telling Time http://www.suite101.com/content/candle-clocks-a99480#ixzz1D0YyJqZg
Our ability to track a steadily moving object goes all the way back to spear throwing
Pickpockets can't move in straight lines because we're too good at predicting endpoint Consider a technique used by the legendary pickpocket Apollo Robbins , another coauthor of the Nature article spearheaded by Macknik and Martinez-Conde. When the researchers asked him about his devious methods—how he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked—they learned something surprising: Robbins said the trick worked only when he moved his free hand in an arc instead of a straight line. According to the thief, these arcs distract the eyes of his victims for a matter of milliseconds, just enough time for his other hand to pilfer their belongings. At first, the scientists couldn't explain this phenomenon. Why would arcs keep us from looking at the right place? But then they began to think about saccades, movements of the eye that can precede conscious decisions about where to turn one's gaze. Saccades are among the fastest movements produced by the human body, which is why a pickpocket has to trick them: The eyes are in fact quicker than the hands. "This is an idea scientists had never contemplated before," Macknik says. "It turns out, though, that the pickpocket was onto something." When we see a hand moving in a straight line, we automatically look toward the end point—this is called the pursuit system. A hand moving in a semicircle, however, seems to short-circuit our saccades. The arc doesn't tell our eyes where the hand is going, so we fixate on the hand itself—and fail to notice the other hand reaching into our pocket. "The pickpocket has found a weakness in the way we perceive motion," Macknik says. "Show the eyes an arc and they move differently." http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/ff_neuroscienceofmagic?currentPage=3
NEED: photo of SXSW registration queue http://www.flickr.com/photos/24502778@N06/2318590593/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/markjaquith/2356705159/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Progress must be quantifiable and there must be an endpoint. (Throbbers are out) Slightly overestimate if endpoint unknown (not really perfect though)
These are TERRIBLE progress bars. They are actually called THROBBERS, although they used to be called HEARTBEATs Thermometer was a bad metaphor, but Heartbeat was a great metaphor http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/the-passive-aggressive-windows-hourglass/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars/11 Throbbers increase frustration just like waiting at an airport. you don't know anything and so you don't expect an end in sight.
Something happens at the end. Action is triggered upon completion Key is - something has to happen when 100% is reached - progress bars measure overall progress to trigger something else - new action is initiated.
LinkedIn and others that use progress bars to motivate completion are a trick because nothing with happen when you hit 100%
It's an itch that needs to be scratched. We LOVE making incremental progress towards a goal. (look up gamification link to this). Example is an aborted countdown – we crave the resolution of tension.
We don't want to know what's happening – just how long between input and output. Set it and forget it layers of abstraction? Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Alfred North Whitehead , Introduction to Mathematics (1911) English mathematician & philosopher (1861 – 1947)
