Hi Silviu,
Thanks for taking time to comment.
I am in complete agreement with you in that showing UI signs of an
application being busy is really good thing. Not showing anything will
be a deadly UI sin.
But the point I am trying to make is about the manner and messages
used in that situation.
First of all, a separate window for expressing "progress" of an
operation is seems to be going against some UI philosophy. My idea of
poping up an window/message box is the case of:
1. A feedback form user is needed. Usually Ok, Cancel, Discard etc.
2. An error notification
If you see carefully both of this situation would need to grab user
attention even if the user is busy with some other app.
whereas a "progress bar" is something is of showing the status of the
operation user has initiated and mostly by default user will expect it
to finish. In this case I guess the best choice is to incorporate the
progress notification in the same window/UI space where user initiated
the operation. (For example, in the case of Installation Source, the
progress bars could easily be placed in the main windows itself, even
better as a list column to show the message on top of progress bar.
This would also make it possible to make the refresh of repositories
multi-threaded and show the progress all of all of them at the same
time)
Also about the sentence used in messages,
How does a message like "Applying Lempel-Ziv-Storer-Szymanski
algorithm" tell you? What if I say "Compressing data?". (Ok the
example will not work if you know data compression stuffs.) Sometimes
to much details are really unnecessary.
Again I will go with a Windows example that I like. Did you notice
that stupid OS whenever turned on will go on for hours slowing down
your box to death with only a icon in the system tray saying
"Downloading updates X%". That's all it says but I am sure behind they
are replacing all their system DLLs. It never says me "Downloading
ntx32-64.dll..." "Executing regsrv32 ntx32-64.DLL ... " blah blah.
Mostly an end used will do not want to know such things, These don't
make any sense to them.
For the Experts, it would be enough to create and save a log somewhere
in the system about all the details that's been done in the update.
I hope you see what I mean. I guess "Please wait while files are being
downloaded" or something along in that line could make a non-techie
feel at home.
Regards,
Mohammad
On 5/14/07, Silviu Marin-Caea
On Sunday 13 May 2007 03:50:21 pm Mohammad Bhuyan wrote:
For example : Explain me how flashing 20/30 progress bar with downlaoding../parsing... messages help while I am adding installation source. As a engineer I can see clearly its a "developer testing" code that helps to see if download/parsing is going OK. How a end user will benefit from this messages. Also that flashing is annoying enough to nuke the programmers den.
Aaha, I can tell you about this!
Before those downloading/parsing progress windows were added, there was nothing. This "nothing" would take a lot of time, during which time the application was busy with that downloading and parsing that is now shown. What was the result of nothing shown? 80% of users thought that something is worng and killed the window, the process etc and started it all over again. Also a lot complained that it's taking too long, suse sucks and such.
Now with those progress windows, users see that something is indeed going on, even if it looks like nonsense to most of them. And people understand that if downloading stuff off the net takes long it's not the fault of the distribution.
This does not change the fact that it's still taking too long :-) but at least it offers an explanation and a diversion to the user.
So, it's a good thing.
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