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

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Apr 28, 2008, at 3:38 PM, Shaun McCance wrote:
> ...
> Indeed.  And that raises the question of what to call those sorts of 
> things.  Perhaps "indicator" is a good word after all, because it's 
> easy to combine it with other nouns, as in "relevance indicator" and 
> "fullness indicator".  Using "bar" with those sounds weird.

Take care not to encourage the introduction of needless terms. Imagine, 
for example, the help that might be provided for a recently-proposed 
new feature in Nautilus:

    The “Popularity” column shows how often you use each file or
    folder. A longer bar in the column indicates a more frequently
    used item. To sort the most frequently used items first, click
    the “Popularity” column header. Click again to reverse the
    sort order.

    An item’s Popularity goes up if you open it from the file
    manager, or in a program that uses the standard Open File
    window. But it won’t change if you open it in a program that
    doesn’t use the standard Open File window, such as Terminal.

Now, we could have introduced and defined a new term for the "bar in 
the column", calling it the "popularity indicator" or somesuch -- but 
for what? We can do just as well without the extra term, and it's one 
less thing for the reader to remember.

Bottom line, I don't think this needs a guideline. In most cases these 
indicators won't need a term at all, and even when they do, they won't 
benefit (and might even cause confusion) from having a consistent term.

> ...
> > 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?

> ...
> > "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.

> > > 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.

(Having said that, I now remember that I've designed a graphical 
depiction of a timeout for Ubuntu's future logout interface. But that 
will be subtly manipulating an existing interface element, not adding a 
new one.)

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/