[Tfug] Progress indicators

[Jeffry Johnston]

Here are my thoughts:

When the prediction is constantly being updated, I feel like I cannot
trust the number of minutes left.  For example, it initially says 12
minutes remaining.  I come back in 12 minutes and it says 9 minutes
remaining.  This can be somewhat lessened by waiting a little bit
before declaring the time remaining.  I think Firefox does this.

Another thing which is annoying is that even though estimates and
re-estimates are continually wrong, the program continues to use the
same estimation technique, so you know it'll be wrong in the future
too.  So then you end up estimating how long it'll REALLY take.  Seems
like it should periodically do a curve fit to the data, and update the
algorithm .. linear, geometric, logarithmic, exponential, etc that
best matches the past performance.

Jeff

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi, Tim,
>
> --- On Tue, 1/13/09, Tim Ottinger <tottinge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > What's the "best" way to convey to a user the "progress"
>> > made on completing a task?
>>
>> If the task has discrete steps, I don't mind seeing a
>> bar per step, provided all the bars show up, and I know
>> that I have 'n' more steps before done.
>
> Yes, but that (can) exhibit the same sort of nonlinear
> behaviour I mentioned.  E.g., you see bars one and two (out
> of 7, total) appear at roughly 3 second intervals (e.g.).
> But, the third bar takes 5 *minutes* to appear -- followed
> by bars 4, 5, 6 and 7 and 1 second intervals.
>
> I *think* the best (?) way to handle it is to make an
> initial *quick* estimate of time required and then keep
> updating this estimate placing more emphasis on the *quality*
> of the estimate as time progresses.  Then, reflect elapsed
> time / estimated time as the "portion complete".
>
> I.e., I *think* users are more interested in how the time
> involved.
>
> OTOH, there are some tasks where the user may be interested
> in "percentage of bytes moved", for example.  This would make
> sense when copying files, for example, *if* the files were
> copied in a predictable (or visible!) order and the user
> *might* be inclined to abort the process:  "Heck, I've
> got several of them copied, I can skip the rest because
> I'm in a rush..."
>
>
>
>
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