Circular progress bar
47%
A progress bar is a
graphical control element
A graphical widget (also graphical control element or control) in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through dir ...
used to visualize the progression of an extended computer operation, such as a download, file transfer, or installation. Sometimes, the graphic is accompanied by a textual representation of the progress in a percent format. The concept can also be regarded to include "playback bars" in
media players that keep track of the current location in the duration of a media file.
A more recent development is the , which is used in situations where the extent of the task is unknown or the progress of the task cannot be determined in a way that could be expressed as a percentage. This bar uses motion or some other indicator to show that progress is taking place, rather than using the size of the filled portion to show the total amount of progress, making it more like a
throbber than a progress bar (see also
barber's pole). There are also indeterminate
progress indicators, which are not bar shaped.
History
The concept of a progress bar was invented before digital computing. In 1896
Karol Adamiecki
Karol Adamiecki ( Dąbrowa Górnicza, 18 March 1866 – 16 May 1933, Warsaw, Poland) was a Polish engineer, management researcher, economist, and professor.
Life
Karol Adamiecki was a prominent management researcher in Eastern and Central Eur ...
developed a chart named a ''harmonogram'', but better known today as a
Gantt chart
A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule, named after its popularizer, Henry Gantt (1861–1919), who designed such a chart around the years 1910–1915. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency relationshi ...
. Adamiecki did not publish his chart until 1931, however, and then only in
Polish. The chart thus now bears the name of
Henry Gantt
Henry Laurence Gantt (; May 20, 1861 – November 23, 1919) was an American mechanical engineer and management consultant who is best known for his work in the development of scientific management. He created the Gantt chart in the 1910s.
Gan ...
(1861–1919), who designed his chart around the years 1910–1915 and popularized it in the west.
Adopting the concept to computing, the first graphical progress bar appeared in Mitchell Model's 1979 Ph. D. thesis, ''Monitoring System Behavior in a Complex Computational Environment''. In 1985,
Brad Myers presented a paper on “percent-done progress indicators” at a conference on computer-human interactions.
Perception
Myers' research involved asking people to run database searches, some with a progress bar and some without. Those who waited whilst watching a progress bar described an overall more positive experience. Myers concluded that the use of a progress bar reduced anxiety and was more efficient.
Typically, progress bars use a linear function, such that the advancement of a progress bar is directly proportional to the amount of work that has been completed. However, varying disk, memory, processor, bandwidth and other factors complicate this estimate. Consequently, progress bars often exhibit non-linear behaviors, such as acceleration, deceleration, and pauses. These behaviors, coupled with humans' non-linear perception of time passing, produces a variable perception of how long progress bars take to complete.
This also means that progress bars can be designed to "feel" faster.
Finally, the graphical design of progress bars has also been shown to influence humans' perception of duration.
[Harrison, C., Yeo, Z., and Hudson, S. E. 2010]
"Faster Progress Bars: Manipulating Perceived Duration with Visual Augmentations"
In Proceedings of the 28th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY. 1545-1548.
See also
*
Progress indicator
References
{{Graphical control elements
Graphical control elements