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So sitting here watching the progress bar of my life creep along, I started thinking about all the progress bars I’ve seen.   The first progress bar I got to know well was the 3d Studio MAX rendering progress bar.  It suffered from the same usability malady that most progress bars do.  If you think about the question that the progress bar anwsers, it should be “When are ya gonna be done?”

The problem is, truthfully, most applications with progress bars don’t really know when they will be done.  3d Studio MAX tried to give me an estimate, but it was almost always extremely optimistic in the beginning, but then adjusted itself to higher levels of accuracy along the way.  One of my favorites is the Windows Explorer progress bar, which will say “Approximately 1 minute”, then flip over immediately to “Approximately 3 hours”.

They sometimes try to tie the bar graph to actual time, but it’s usually either a guess, or really a percentage of done-ness, as far as how much of a task was completed, regardless of how much time it took, or will take.  But, us humans really only care about when it will finish.

But machines don’t care about time.  They have infinite patience.  Time is irrelevant aside from the tiniest of clock-cycles running its endless computations.  They try to bring us over to their side.  They want us to be like them.  When we sit in front of the computer, time becomes a fallacy - flying by, getting away from us, eventually catching up to us when it’s time to come back to reality.

Fortunately, progress bars have caught onto the roguishness of time, and have become equally deceitful.  Sometimes they’ll give you the answer, only to morph suddenly into a shifty Cylon eye, or a gleeful little sideways barber pole.

If it’s hard for desktop apps to give an accurate reflection of progress, it’s even harder for web apps.  We can tell you how much has downloaded, but really, who knows how long it will take because you are downloading mp3s and warez in the background.

It brings to mind the question, what really is progress?  Is the progress bar really demonstrating forward progress?  If it did, when you install Windows XP on your new Macbook, does the progress bar go backwards?