The Invention of the Progress Bar

Before 1985, you’d have had no idea how long it would take to install a program on your computer—or to save a file, or to complete an online form. (To be fair, there were no online forms.) Consider the history of the progress bar, then discuss with your team: what other activities and interactions in life would benefit from a progress bar?

Before 1985 a 'thinking' computer just froze — you couldn't tell if it had died. Then Brad Myers, a grad student, tried a bar that filled left to right. Same wait, less dread.

Key concepts

Uncertainty Reduction: The bar's real job is not speed but removing the dread of not knowing whether something is broken or merely slow. It swaps the unanswerable 'is this frozen?' for a plain 'it's 60 percent done', and a wait you can see the end of stops feeling like a threat.
Perceived Versus Actual Duration: How long something feels is a separate quantity from how long it takes. Myers held the actual time fixed and the bar still made the wait feel shorter — proof that you can change a person's experience of time without touching the clock at all.

Every work — at a glance

The Progress Bar — Brad Myers, 1985 (interface element)

The percent-done indicator introduced by the computer scientist Brad Myers in 1985. Its genius was never speed — it was telling you the wait was real, was working, and would end.

What to know

01
What else in life would benefit from a progress bar? Anything whose duration is invisible and uncertain — a job application, a recovery, a skill half-learned. In each the anxiety comes not from the length but from not being able to see your position, so a bar would calm you without moving you one step faster.
02
The bar improves the wait without shortening it, which means the hard part of waiting is largely psychological — a problem of uncertainty, not of duration. That is why designers now add bars that are not even accurate, ones that visibly speed up near the end, because a wait that feels like it is progressing is one people don't abandon.

Across subjects

Long before the screen, people built machines to make time visible. An hourglass changed nothing about how long an hour lasted; it only let you watch the sand fall and see where you stood. A ship's sandglass paced the watches; church bells named the hours. Each speeds nothing up — it tells you where you are.

Theme connection

Being told the answer changes everything — a filling bar made computing bearable by ending the terror of not knowing. So which of life's waits deserve one? One side says as many as possible: visible progress calms and motivates. The other warns it turns us into clock-watchers, trading experience for a number ticking toward done.

Practice

Check what you've read

Pick the best answer — you'll see why each option is right or wrong.

Question 1 of 2

SPCA developer's install screen freezes with no feedback and users panic and quit. Which would you tell them to add?

Question 2 of 2

SPCIn telling you how far along a wait is, a progress bar is MOST like —