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by intrepidhero
1938 days ago
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When a program is performing a task that is going to make me wait I want lots of communication. Imagine I ordered a sandwich in a restaurant and its taking longer than expected. I'm now faced with a decision, do I wait or do I leave? I could make a better decision about what to do if I could see how many orders are ahead of me or if I can watch the kitchen and see a stack of ingredients ready to go, but the chef paused to clean off the grill. In the case of computer it can be hard to know beforehand exactly what its going to do and how long it will take. Maybe there is some kind of issue I need to fix before the task will ever be complete. As computers and networks evolve and improve (or degrade) it can be really hard for the programmer to have a good idea of how long a task will take to complete. In light of that, I would always err on the side of giving the user more information about what the program is doing and how long its taking. On a file transfer I'd really like to know, how much has been copied, how much is remaining and the current (5 sec average maybe) bit rate. That gives me enough information to know whether its worth waiting around for it to finish or I should find an alternative or the connection has dropped. Staring at a spinner, with no idea how fast or slow things are going is the worst and I'm going to give up a lot sooner than if I knew what was happening. |
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Ordering a sandwich in a restaurant apparently becomes less normal nowadays. Instead we order it online for delivery. I would find it extremely annoying if the delivery service keeps sending me messages about his status. If the delivery is going to arrive at the time frame I asked for, I don't want any extra information from them. While I wait for the sandwich delivery, I can order other stuff too. I only want any messages about anything I ordered is if the delivery is not going to make it. If I received such delivery error, I can submit another order from a different delivery service.
Now you can go down a level and consider how the restaurant operates in this case. The restaurant receives orders from a queue and make those in batches. Whenever the delivery person comes, the restaurant hands out packaged orders each with their endpoint addresses. The restaurant does not need any extra information from you or the delivery person, unless something unexpected happens. There is no need for extra communication unless there is an interruption.
If you are the restaurant owner, of course you need to manage ordering ingredients for the restaurant, and ordering sandwiches for yourself. Whatever you need to order, your system can be transparent to it. Once you make the decision what to order, you can go back to paragraph two above and start from there.