I Hate Misleading Progress Bars

I was installing Autodesk Inventor the other day. It went pretty smoothly, though it took an ungodly amount of time as CAD programs like Inventor do—I think SolidWorks took even longer. But one of the things that annoyed me was the misleading progress bar. Like most program installations, Inventor has a little bar that fills up as the installation progresses. Except this one filled up more than once.

The entire point of a progress bar is to let the user know how much longer he or she has to sit around waiting. Having the bar fill up and then restart and fill up again defeats the entire purpose. There was no way for me to know how long I had to wait before I could use my computer again besides the broken progress bar that served absolutely no purpose other than to give me some sort false hope of going back to work soon.

Inventor is not the only program I’ve used that does this either. This has been a long time peeve of mine that drives me up the wall sometimes during really long tasks. If a progress bar doesn’t accurately show how far a process has gone, than it’s just a useless progress bar that should be replaced with a more useful indicator.

You could argue that the progress bar is there to show the user that the process is working and hasn’t frozen and died. But there’s a reason why it’s called a progress bar. When a user sees a bar filling up, he expects it to be an indicator of how far a long a process is and how much it has left to go. A good example of this is the WinRAR‘s progress bar when it’s creating an archive. The top progress bar does in fact fill up several times, but that’s because it shows the progress for each file being archived and it tells the user this—no deception there. The bottom bar fills up once, and only once, to show the progress of the archive as a whole.

If you want to let the user know something is simply working, make an animation. For example, when you’re burning a disc in Nero it shows a little animation of a file flying into a disc. It also has a progress bar, but it actually works. Some programs are really stuck on bars though and that’s okay if you do it right. Take the Flock splash screen for example.

These are called indeterminate progress bars, but I like to call them busy indicators or animations. It has a bar, but it’s not filling up. It’s more like a worm racing across a bar. Windows XP does the same thing on its boot screen. What does this accomplish? It tells the user that the task is busy working through the use of motion, while not deceiving her into thinking that there are x minutes left to go.

I’m no usability expert but I’m pretty sure one of the goals is not to confuse the user. If there’s going to be a progress bar, make sure it works. If it doesn’t, then either don’t put one, or clearly make it a busy animation. A progress bar and a busy indicator are two very different animals and deserve to be clearly distinguished.