[dwohnitmok]

Proposal 1 is the thing I want.

Please just list out a total number of steps and log when each of those steps is completed (with a short message describing what the step is so that we don't end up back on square one with fractional progress bars). If possible make the steps granular enough so that a step can be completed in under a second (so this may be hundreds or thousands of steps depending on the task length). In the case of say "bytes currently downloaded" this becomes essentially a continuous stream of steps (which is a good thing!).

First and foremost what this communicates to users is that the system is doing something useful. This is what frustrates me about spinners. They are functionally indistinguishable from a frozen system, to the point now that users synonymously identify an indefinitely spinning spinner with a frozen system. And progress bars that asymptotically approach completion even when the program is frozen have trained users to be similarly suspicious of progress bars.

Secondarily it offers the same vague assurances as a progress bar about approximately how much time is left. If you see 250 GB out of 500 GB downloaded you'll assume that you're half-way there, similarly if you see 250 steps out of 500 completed. Especially in the case of the latter, there's no guarantee that the total elapsed time is already 50% over, but that's true of progress bars as well.

Finally, if something goes wrong, there's usually a useful error message that can be shown since there's the context of all the previous steps that led up to this error.

[news_to_me]

I think there's two issues here that are often wrapped up together: 1. what is the status of my task, and 2. did the computer get stuck

If we could be sure the computer wouldn't get stuck (which is just a bug), then progress bars and spinners would be fine. If the task is as granular as you suggest, progress bars would be a great visual indicator, much better than text.

But since computers do get stuck, additional indicators should help with that. A spinner is supposed to show that a process isn't stuck, but those are fallible too. A textual representation ("bytes currently downloaded") sounds like a great addition to a progress bar. I've seen this a lot on linux distro installers, where you can click "details" below the progress bar to see the console output.

[Inityx]

I'm so sick and tired of seeing spinners that keep spinning, even after the process failed; this is an epidemic in web apps, where failures are often a bit too graceful and application state is silently corrupted.

[dec0dedab0de]

About 15 years ago a coworker had a spinner that was an animated gif, When I see people doing font awesome spinners it reminds me of that gif and I get just as angry.

[ema]

Maybe there should also be a "seconds since last progress update" counter. In case of a download it gets reset every time a new packet arrives.

[TeMPOraL]

> But since computers do get stuck, additional indicators should help with that.

They need to be trustworthy. For that, they need to be wired directly into the process doing the work. So no spinner gifs that are animated by the browser/renderer, and can spin forever even if your application dies. It needs to be something where any visual change is directly related to the operations you're monitoring.

That's why a list with textual descriptions of step is a great idea - it's literally too much work to implement it in a way other than the actual completion of a step displaying/ticking off a corresponding label. So seeing that, I'd know the software isn't lying to me.

[hakfoo]

How about a progress bar that you can expand into a more itemized status presentation-- either a list of tasks or even a log of exactly the last task started and when it was done.

Itemizing individual steps allows users to reason about their performance characteristics, if well explained. These might cause jerkiness in the overall bar.

If I had a progress bar stuck at 27%, it would be valuable to click a little "view more" link and see "11:34 AM: begin downloading file 27/100: foo.tgz (62.3Gb)" I'd be more willing to expect to wait on it advancing than if it was a 30k file.

[tsjq]

yes. i think this is done by the Ubuntu software updater app.