Re: [Nautilus-list] Progress Bar on Move

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Martin Wehner wrote:

> I would be interested in opinions about showing the progress bar for
> very fast operations. One might argue that the progress dialog should be
> shown for every operation - to provide feedback and give the user the
> opportunity to cancel the (possibly destructive) operation. Or would it
> be ok to have a progress that comes up only if the operation takes
> longer than a certain amount of time? This seemed to be the original
> intend of the authors (on move at least). Should this be handled
> differently for the various operation classes (move/copy/delete/trash)?
> I'm running a version with a delayed (0.5sec) progress dialog now (for
> all operations) - And I like it. It feels like sane behaviour for me.
> But I'm kinda preoccupied because I invested the time to make it happen.

The Feedback chapter of the draft GNOME UI Styleguide has some guidance
on this, although it's in need of continued editing/review-- this thread
has already given me some ideas of things to add :)  Of particular
interest is probably:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig/acceptable-response-times.html

The delayed feedback dialog sounds like a good idea.  It's hard to say
without user testing, but my hunch would be that 0.5 seconds is a little
quicker than it needs to be-- as you'll see from that URL, 1 second
might be a better delay to try, since people are generally comfortable
with operations taking that long (but no longer) without any feedback. 
And too much feedback is sometimes just as annoying as too little :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems