Re: Word-a-Day: progress bar, progress indicator

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 08:21 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On Apr 28, 2008, at 3:38 PM, Shaun McCance wrote:
> >> Agreed, but it should be *extremely* rare for help text to even 
> >> mention progress bars, so this is mostly moot.
> >
> > The terminology recommendations are not just for documentation.
> 
> By "help text" I'm including help provided in the interface, as well as 
> in separate help pages. Are you referring to that, or something else?

When companies have internal style guides, they often
stress that the recommendations should be followed in
all forms of communications.  Aside from documentation
and user interfaces, this includes marketing material,
email, and support forums.

Obviously, the nature of our community precludes us
from having strict editorial control over all these
sorts of things.  But having guidelines in place that
can be applied in those places is a first step towards
people voluntarily choosing to follow the guidelines.

(This is perhaps not so relevant to whether or not
the word "progress bar" is likely to be used.  But
it is relevant in another thread, where you said
that text-only help is only relevant for text-only
programs.)

> >> "Indicator" or "disc" would be sufficient, I think. For example: "If
> >> there is a disc to the right of an e-mail account, it shows 
> >> Evolution's progress in downloading or synchronizing messages in that 
> >> account."
> >
> > That gets us into the "disk vs disc" debate.  The shape tends to be 
> > spelled "disk", at least by mathematicians.  Of course, what you 
> > actually see is a circular sector, not an entire disk.
> >
> > I'm curious how real users would respond to the term "progress disk".
> 
> Another needless neologism, I think. They could learn it, but they 
> shouldn't have to.

Well, fine, but we still have to describe it, as you
did in your sample sentence.  So even if you don't
say "progress disk", you still have to decide whether
to call it a "disk", "disc", "circle", or "pie".  The
question is whether we should recommend something.

> >>> Second, what about countdown controls?  They basically look like
> >>> progress bars (or sometimes "progress pies"), but the control moves
> >>> backward.  They aren't showing progress.  Usually, they're showing a
> >>> timeout.
> >>> ...
> >>
> >> I think the appropriate term for those is "utter crack".
> >
> > Which part is crack?  The fact that there's a timeout, or the fact 
> > that there's a graphical depiction of it?
> 
> The latter.
> 
> > If you're going to have a timeout, I think a graphical depiction is 
> > helpful.  And I can think of lots of places where it's necessary or 
> > useful.
> > ...
> 
> I've seen it used in only two places -- xscreensaver and 
> gnome-power-manager -- and in both it was far more distracting than 
> useful.

When Banshee plays a new track, it shows a notification
with the title, album, artist, and cover art.  This is
nice.  I like it, and I think most Banshee users do as
well.

One of the nice (newish) features of the notification
is that there's a 'Skip this track' button.  It's handy
when you put your entire collection on shuffle, and a
song comes on that you're just not in the mood for.

As with any notification, Banshee's notifications go
away automatically after some number of seconds.  But
they have this countdown disk that shows you how long
it will be before they disappear.  This actually makes
me feel less rushed, because I know how much time I
have to hit it.  Without the disk, I would feel like
I have to drop what I'm doing and hit it *right now*,
because it could disappear any second.

--
Shaun