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, when your computer was 'thinking,' you had no idea whether it was working or had crashed — you just stared at a frozen screen and hoped. Then a grad student named Brad Myers tested a little bar that filled left to right, and found people were calmer even when the task took exactly as long. The progress bar was born.
Key concepts
- The Progress Bar
- A visual 'percent-done' indicator, introduced by computer scientist Brad Myers in 1985 — its genius wasn't speed but telling you the wait was working and would end.
- Uncertainty Reduction
- The bar's real job: removing the dread of not knowing whether something is broken or just slow — replacing 'is this frozen?' with 'it's 60% done.'
- Perceived Versus Actual Duration
- How long something feels versus how long it takes — Myers showed the same wait feels shorter with a bar, changing your experience of time without touching the clock.
- Feedback
- Information a system gives you about how it's doing — a progress bar is feedback in its purest form, and people wait more patiently and quit less when they can see they're getting somewhere.
What to know
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01
The progress bar improves the wait without shortening it — Myers held the actual time constant and people still preferred the bar, proving the problem with waiting is largely psychological, a matter of uncertainty not duration.
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