TED Talks · Small thing Big idea

How the progress bar keeps you sane

How many people are bored at their desk for how Many hours every day and how

Level: B1 · 71 sentences

Transcript

  1. How many people are bored at their desk for how
  2. Many hours every day and how
  3. Many days a week and how
  4. Many weeks a year for how
  5. Many years in their life?
  6. The progress bar is just an indicator on a computer
  7. That something's happening inside the device.
  8. The classic one that's been used for years is a horizontal bar.
  9. I mean, this goes back to pre-computer
  10. Versions of this on ledgers where
  11. People would fill in a horizontal
  12. Bar from left to right to show
  13. How much of a task they'd
  14. Completed at a factory.
  15. This is just the same thing on a screen.
  16. Something happened in the 70s that is sometimes referred to as the software crisis,
  17. Where suddenly computers were getting more complicated more quickly than
  18. Anyone had been prepared for from a design perspective.
  19. People were using percent done indicators in different ways.
  20. So you might have a graphical countdown clock,
  21. Or they would have a line of asterisks
  22. That would fill up from left to right on the screen.
  23. But no one had kind of done a systematic survey of these things
  24. And tried to figure out how do they actually affect
  25. The user's experience of sitting at the computer.
  26. This graduate student named Brad Myers in 1985
  27. Decided he would study this.
  28. He found that it didn't really matter
  29. If the percent done indicator was giving you
  30. The accurate percent done.
  31. What mattered was that it was there at all.
  32. Just seeing it there made people feel better.
  33. And that was the most surprising thing.
  34. He has all these ideas about what this thing could do.
  35. Maybe it could make people relax effectively.
  36. Maybe it would allow people to turn away from their machine
  37. And do something else of exactly the right duration.
  38. They would look and say, oh, the progress bar is half done.
  39. That took five minutes or whatever.
  40. So now I have five minutes to send this fax for whatever people were doing in 1985.
  41. Both of those things are wrong.
  42. Like when you see that progress bar,
  43. It sort of locks your attention in a tractor beam
  44. And it turns the experience of waiting into this exciting narrative
  45. That you're seeing unfold in front of you. And somehow this time
  46. That you've spent waiting in frustration for the computer to do something has been reconceptualized as progress.
  47. Oh, great stuff is happening.
  48. But once You start thinking about the progress bar as something that's more about
  49. Dulling the pain of waiting.
  50. Well, then you can start fiddling around with the psychology.
  51. So if you just have a progress bar
  52. That just moves at a constant rate,
  53. Let's say that's really what's happening in the computer,
  54. That will feel to people like it's slowing down.
  55. We get bored.
  56. Well, now you can start trying to enhance it,
  57. Make it appear to move more quickly than it really is.
  58. Make it move faster at the beginning,
  59. Like a burst of speed that's exciting.
  60. People feel like, oh, something's really happening.
  61. And then you can kind of move back into a more naturalistic
  62. Growth of the progress bar as you go along.
  63. You're assuming that people are focusing on the passage of time.
  64. They're trying to watch grass grow.
  65. They're trying to watch a pot of water waiting for it to boil.
  66. And you're just trying to make that happen.
  67. Less boring, less painful, and less frustrating than it was before.
  68. So the progress bar at least gives you
  69. The vision of a beginning and an end,
  70. And you're working towards a goal.
  71. I think in some ways it mitigates the fear of death. Too much?