How the progress bar keeps you sane | Small Thing Big Idea, a TED series

239,811 views ・ 2018-11-03

TED


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Translator: Camille Martínez Reviewer: Krystian Aparta
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Translator: Camille Martínez Reviewer: Daban Q. Jaff
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How many people are bored at their desk
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for how many hours every day
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and how many days a week and how many weeks a year
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for how many years in their life?
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[Small thing. Big idea.]
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[Daniel Engber on the Progress Bar]
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The progress bar is just an indicator on a computer
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that something's happening inside the device.
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The classic one that's been used for years is a horizontal bar.
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I mean, this goes back to pre-computer versions of this
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on ledgers, where people would fill in a horizontal bar from left to right
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to show how much of a task they had completed at a factory.
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This is just the same thing on a screen.
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Something happened in the 70s
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that is sometimes referred to as "the software crisis,"
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where suddenly, computers were getting more complicated
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more quickly than anyone had been prepared for,
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from a design perspective.
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People were using percent-done indicators in different ways.
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So you might have a graphical countdown clock,
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or they would have a line of asterisks
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that would fill out from left to right on a screen.
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But no one had done a systematic survey of these things
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and tried to figure out:
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How do they actually affect the user's experience
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of sitting at the computer?
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This graduate student named Brad Myers,
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in 1985, decided he would study this.
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He found that it didn't really matter
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if the percent-done indicator was giving you the accurate percent done.
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What mattered was that it was there at all.
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Just seeing it there made people feel better,
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and that was the most surprising thing.
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He has all these ideas about what this thing could do.
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Maybe it could make people relax effectively.
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Maybe it would allow people to turn away from their machine
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and do something else of exactly the right duration.
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They would look and say, "Oh, the progress bar is half done.
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That took five minutes.
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So now I have five minutes to send this fax,"
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or whatever people were doing in 1985.
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Both of those things are wrong.
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Like, when you see that progress bar,
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it sort of locks your attention in a tractor beam,
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and it turns the experience of waiting
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into this exciting narrative that you're seeing unfold in front of you:
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that somehow, this time you've spent waiting in frustration
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for the computer to do something,
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has been reconceptualized as:
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"Progress! Oh! Great stuff is happening!"
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[Progress...]
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But once you start thinking about the progress bar
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as something that's more about dulling the pain of waiting,
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well, then you can start fiddling around with the psychology.
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So if you have a progress bar that just moves at a constant rate --
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let's say, that's really what's happening in the computer --
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that will feel to people like it's slowing down.
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We get bored.
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Well, now you can start trying to enhance it
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and make it appear to move more quickly than it really is,
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make it move faster at the beginning, like a burst of speed.
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That's exciting, people feel like, "Oh! Something's really happening!"
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Then you can move back into a more naturalistic growth of the progress bar
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as you go along.
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You're assuming that people are focusing on the passage of time --
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they're trying to watch grass grow,
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they're trying to watch a pot of water, waiting for it to boil,
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and you're just trying to make that less boring,
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less painful and less frustrating
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than it was before.
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So the progress bar at least gives you
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the vision of a beginning and an end,
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and you're working towards a goal.
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I think in some ways, it mitigates the fear of death.
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Too much?
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