On Nov 26, 2007, at 12:34 PM, Julie Stanford wrote:
> After that, I am wondering which of the following should be
> displayed --
> here's a list of options on the table and there could be more:
>
> Visual info:
> - Animation showing things being copied
Make sure that any animation is appropriate to the project. The old
Windows animation of crumpled paper being tossed to the trash can, for
example: great for a home audience, maybe less so for an office. (And
myself, I found it cute the first three times, annoying after that.
Always a risk with something that draws the eye a lot and is seen a
lot.)
> - Progress bar showing visually how much is done
Be sure that if there is non-specific progress -- "We're working on
this, but we have no way to tell when we may be done" -- that an
appropriate progress meter is used. The project I'm on has legacy
progress bars that fill to the full point, then start over; bait-and-
switch, but there are too many more significant issues to deal with to
fix that.
> Text info:
> - X min remaining
> - X of Y KB
> - X% complete
> - X of Y min complete
Make sure that the size chunks and the text update rate are
reasonable. Time should be like 4:42, not 4.7 minutes. If content
chunks are on the order of MB, then don't show at the KB level, since
anything under 100 KB is junk info.
If viable, use both time and some other factor: "Transferring 87 of
203 files, about 4:30 minutes remaining". Different people find
different value representations to be more informative, so why limit
to just one.
>
> - Other stuff I missed?
Appropriate use of color?
We had a "disk fullness" meter at one point which went from green
through yellow to red. Great idea on the surface, lousy in practice
because it was "nearly red" (which implies dangerously full) at about
the 80% mark. So with a 40 GB disk, it was saying "don't transfer any
more" when there was still 8 GB remaining (and content chunks tended
to be 500KB to 5 MB, so there was still room for, oh, 3 *thousand*
pieces of content).
-- Jim Drew
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.soundskinky.com/blog/
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