fake progress bars aren’t bad
chris and i were once involved in a debate about the use of progress bars when we were deciding whether or not kickapps’ upload screen should have an ajax-based progress bar or a fake-y animated gif progress bar. my preference was to go the animated gif route while chris (and others) wanted to do something real, an ajax-y progress bar.
my rationale for the animated gif progress bar is that it’s cheap to implement, reliable, and feeds the user back that “something is happening”, which is the primary goal of the progress bar. at kickapps, sadly, i failed to influence the decisionmakers into doing what i believed was the right thing. we ended up going the way of the ajax progress bar, which ended up being all kind of broken.
i just bought an airline ticket from orbitz. what kind of progress indicator do they use? the gif. here it is:
it’s not the best progress bar in the world, but it gets the job done. i personally like those horizontal infinite barber-shop pole kind of progress bars, which you can see over at mentalized. here’s an example.
other advantages of a fake-y animated gif progress bar? well, if you work for a startup in a crowded social-media space, you’re working with limited resources (money, people, time to acquisition, quickly diminishing barriers to entry). the solution is clear: pick the cheapest good-enough solution that gets the job done. you’re not winning any points for innovating on progress bar implementations, that’ s for damn sure. spend your time somewhere else, where it matters.
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You’re currently reading “fake progress bars aren’t bad,” an entry on e-huned.com
- Published:
- 08.16.06 / 8pm
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