Pet peeve: time left 2 minutes, no wait 3 days

[Kalle]

Tonight I encrypted my hard drive with Truecrypt. A fairly uneventful procedure since it just did it's thing in the background without requiring any attention. I checked in every once in a while to see how much time was left but it was decidedly unhelpful. When it neared the end of the process I saw the "time left" box cycle through a half-dozen values from 107 days(!) to three minutes in rapid succession.

And yeah, this is all boring crap, but I see the same thing practically everywhere. If you're doing something on your computer and a time estimate is involved it's never accurate, or even remotely close to being useful. Why try to estimate the time down to the precise second if you're gonna have to re-estimate and come up with a wildly different answer a second later?

A workable estimate would presumably involve some kind of measurement of x amount of work done already over y amount of time, looking at actual performance instead of fantasy projected numbers, but if that can't be done why the fuck bother to include the numbers? They're useless. Less than useless, they give you wrong information.

Stupid rant time over.

[Shadarr]

Having worked on a product that added a progress bar, I can tell you that the purpose of the progress bar is to tell the user that the program is still working, not to accurately display progress. For anything more complex than a file transfer it's difficult to estimate the amount of work to be done, and any processing time wasted on making a better guess about how long it will take is time not spent doing the actual work.

In other words, suck it up princess.

My favourite progress bar is the one for the IBM Content Manager installer (and probably other large server apps). It slowly creeps upwards, telling you what percentage complete it is. Then the installation inevitably runs into some sort of permissions problem or missing dependency and can't continue, and it un-does everything up to that point while the progress bar shrinks back to zero.

[Pogo]

Yeah, I really just assume progress bars are to say that something is still happening, and any number values assigned are almost completely useless. File transfers over networks or copying files on a hard drive seem to get really close, and downloading is also pretty straightforward and accurate, but anything else with a number value is pretty borderline useless.

[Kalle]

Yeah, but there's already a progress bar and a % done counter. Why put in a damn time estimate too if it's not gonna add any useful information.

[robsam]

I ran a complete scan for malware, trojans, etc, then a complete defrag today. It took forever, but the progress bar was reasuring me that at least something was happening. It took so long, hours, that I would seriously have assumed my system was locked up and canceled more than once.

[Aszurom]

yeah, one thing I'm NOT a fan of is the little pinwheel that spins. Because I never trust that the box isn't just locked up but still breathing just enough to process that animated gif loop. :-/

[Miramon]

The best thing is when the progress bar completes and the process doesn't complete. Is it working? Hanging? Who can say?

[EvilIdler]

Another peeve: Progress bars which say they're 100% done due to rounding errors/bad math.

Useful progress bars count down, with a number other than time left.

[Jason McCullough]

Doing a progress bar right is way harder than you'd think, and virtually no one cares. So you're looking at an economically rational outcome for anything short of a huge scenario like Windows file copy (http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx).

[Chris Nahr]

The best thing is when the progress bar completes and the process doesn't complete. Is it working? Hanging? Who can say?

Microsoft's MSI installer performs several actions, one after another. There's only one progress bar, however. The solution? For every new action, reset the progress bar to zero and then fill it up again! And it won't tell you how many actions there are in total...

[Hanzii]

Microsoft's MSI installer performs several actions, one after another. There's only one progress bar, however. The solution? For every new action, reset the progress bar to zero and then fill it up again! And it won't tell you how many actions there are in total...

That was what I waqs going to post - those are the worst.
I realize there's too many factors to accurately predict how long stuff will take, but don't fucking fool me into believing that once the bar is full, you're done. If you want to show small processes finishing, then do what Teracopy (and others, I'm sure) does and show one large 'overall progress' and a new one for all the seperate processes.
Teracopy is also very precise, so it can be done and some of us do care.

[Equis]

Updating Lotro from ground up had my progress bar note it's updated itself of 850% of the files needed. That's a lot of redundant files!

[Hunty]

I understand the necessity of having some sort of bar for really long processes, and how it's always likely to be inaccurate. My bugbear is a more niche variant - stuff that takes say, 5-10 minutes to do, but the progress bar stays on 100% for about half that time.

[Kael]

I understand the necessity of having some sort of bar for really long processes, and how it's always likely to be inaccurate. My bugbear is a more niche variant - stuff that takes say, 5-10 minutes to do, but the progress bar stays on 100% for about half that time.

I used to support a product that did that. I told my customers that it was their extra software they were getting free of charge. Most companies stop at 100%, but we throw in a little extra.

[Hunty]

Smooth. Did that actually work?

[WarrenM]

Things like Windows File Copy are, IMO, basing their estimate on the last file they processed. If it was a large file, the time remaining suddenly jumps. A small file and it suddenly drops. It's stupid, but I think that's probably what the encryption software above was doing as well.

[Kael]

Smooth. Did that actually work?

Yeah. They get a little laugh out of it, and they stop being as agrivated by it. Its not a magic bullet, but a little focus shift can be helpful from time to time. Its not that they believed it was really "bonus software", its just a better answer after 4 hours installing software then explaining why progress bars are just estimations.