Make progress bars feel faster

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1

Uxmovement has a new article discussing some experiments done with progress indicators.

It’s not set up as a link, but there’s a URL to a youtube video showing the progress bars.

Perception of speed is actually even more important than real speed most of the time, but assuming of course you’ve done all you could to improve real speed, here are the article’s suggestions:

Progress bars: they look like they move faster if there are backwards-moving “ripples” in the bar.

  1. If the progress bar is not going to move in a stable rate, have it pause near the beginning rather than at the end. If it speeds up movement at the end, users feel it’s actually faster than it really is.

Radial progress indicators (which do not show how much time is remaining): make them “spin” faster.

This is kinda lawlz but people are strange.

2

The best progress “bars” are those that doing something interactive or different. For example I always find a glass filling up or a picture being drawn to be really neat.

I actually saw a loading bar that was nyan cat flying across the screen. I’ll see if I can find it again.

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4

Now that is just awesome! It’s so amusing that a progress bar becomes somewhat of an enjoyable experience.

5

What about a progress bar that goes from right to left?
Or from 100% to 0%? and keeps loading at 3% :slight_smile:

6

One would think going from 100 to 0 would be viewed the same, a countdown, but personally I get more impatient for some reason : )

Keeps loading at 3%? I think I’d cancel the action : )

Would be cool to have some graphics guys/animators make all sorts of progress bars for testing.

7

No you wouldn’t… according to this post, you’d just leave, or log out and leave :wink:

8

Haha, yeah