Doesn't that defeat the purpose, though? Progress indicators are designed to make you think things are going faster than they are. If you want to display accurate information, why not just display it?
"Progress indicators are designed to make you think things are going faster than they are."
Says who? I think progress indicators are intended to communicate more-granular details about the true progress towards some goal ... hence their name.
That doesn't even pass the sniff test. What progress indicator can you come up with that provides more or better information in the same space than "95% loaded" or "10.7/75MB of files copied"? Why do you think progress bars so frequently do not include that straightforward information?
It's a scam. It's a nice scam, of course, since it makes computers seem faster, and that's most of what really matters, but a scam nonetheless.
It's not about better information, it's about speed of information. You can look at a progress bar and instantly gauge the progress of your task. "10.7/75MB copied" is more precise, but of less intrinsic value--I have to calculate in my head where the halfway point is. To get a percentage in my head out of those numbers is even harder.
Try it. Half of 75 is about 37, so I'm a little under a third of the way to the halfway point. I'll be a quarter done at ~19. Takes about two seconds. Even faster for a computer, of course.
Now do that with a progress bar. You can't. What do you do, hold a piece of paper under the bar and fold it in half? Then guess whether the bar is measuring estimated time to completion, percent of data transferred, or percent of files transferred?
You can ballpark it at a glance, sure. It's obviously under a quarter done. Obviously over a tenth. Is it under a fifth? Maybe. We're just not good at judging those things. And progress animations are deliberately designed to make it even harder.
And don't get me wrong-- it's nice to be able to ballpark it at a glance. It reassures me that it's moving at all. It gives me some idea of how much longer it will take. It makes it seem like it's going faster. That's what I'm saying.
Progress bars are what you make them. There are many accurate progress bars in use(Windows 7 file copy, YouTube progress bar). They are not inherently designed to mislead.
I think buffer indicators are a different beast from progress bars-- the timeline is a UI element, and the buffer indicator shows something concrete relating to it.
But I don't think I've said progress bars are bad. They're useful! It's just the idea of "maybe we can make progress indicators more accurate" that's ridiculous.
jsdalton was merely proposing ways this demo could be enhanced by linking it's behavior to a source of data. You're the one going all over the place with your disdain for progress bars, suggesting they are inaccurate & "a scam", then taking it back or questioning what a progress bar is... I am really not sure how a progress bar for a video buffer is all that different from a progress bar for a file transfer.
No idea where you see disdain, and I certainly haven't taken anything back. Progress bars are inaccurate, in the sense that they're simply not a good way to convey accurate information about task completion to a human user. Them's just facts.
But that's not bad. I said it was a nice scam. Sometimes it's good to be fooled. Putting a minigame during the load screen doesn't make the real game load any faster, but it makes the time seem to pass faster, and that's nice. Doesn't make it not fooling.
As for streaming video, as I said already, a video buffer indicator is tied to a UI element in the timeline. It tells me where I can scrub to in the timeline and have it play video immediately without buffering. That's useful.
It's not useful as a progress indicator, for telling me how much longer I need to wait to watch the video-- because my computer is way, way better at doing that math than I am. I would much rather have a simple indicator that tells me, given my current download speed, whether I will have to wait for buffering before it finishes playing, and if so, how long I have to wait until that is not the case. In fairness, you can get a decent idea of that based on whether or not the buffer indicator is advancing away from the playhead, which is another detail that distinguishes a streaming buffer from other sorts of progress indicators.
I use indicators whenever I need to provide feedback for viewers waiting for some action to take place so they don't think that something froze/disconnected/isn't responding.
