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from the push,-pull,-swipe,-turn-and-Pong dept.
Late for work in Manhattan, you push the crosswalk button and curse silently at the slowness of the signal change. You finally get a green light, cross the street, arrive at the office, get in the elevator and hit the close door (>|<) button to speed things along. Getting out on your target floor, you find that hurrying has you a bit hot under the collar, so you reach for the thermostat to turn up the air conditioning.
Each of these seemingly disconnected everyday buttons you pressed may have something in common: it is quite possible that none of them did a thing to influence the world around you. Any perceived impact may simply have been imaginary, a placebo effect giving you the illusion of control.
In the early 2000s, New York City transportation officials finally admitted what many had suspected: the majority of crosswalk buttons in the city are completely disconnected from the traffic light system. Thousands of these initially worked to request a signal change but most no longer do anything, even if their signage suggests otherwise.
[...] Today, a combination of carefully orchestrated automation and higher traffic has made most of these buttons obsolete. Citywide, there are around 100 crosswalk buttons that still work in NYC but close to 1,000 more that do nothing at all. So why not take them down? Removing the remaining nonfunctional buttons would cost the city millions, a potential waste of already limited funds for civic infrastructure.
More examples are quoted in linked article, and some suggestions how tech can make our lives more pleasant while waiting - Pong anyone?.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:31PM
Hey, if you're so smart, you write a better one.
As frustrating as they may be, sometimes it's not *possible* to give an accurate prediction. And are you sure it was time elapsed, not % progress?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:51PM
As frustrating as they may be, sometimes it's not *possible* to give an accurate prediction.
In which case, why bother to have one anyway?
And are you sure it was time elapsed, not % progress?
Regardless, progress bars, IMHO, should be reserved for situations where there's actually some sort of rough correlation between "progress" and "time." By placing a bar that fills up while moving in a particular direction, you are creating a sense of dimensionality that should correlate to SOMETHING. If it doesn't correlate (at least roughly) to time, then what does "progress" even mean?
Now, you might say, "Well, it could be correlated to the number of files copied. You need to copy 100 files, but the last 3 files are a thousand times as big as the rest." Well, then are you really measuring "progress" in a meaningful sense? Most people don't care how many files are copied -- they want to know when something is going to be done.
And if copying the files won't reasonably correlate with time, then maybe you should just get rid of the progress bar completely and just have a file counter displayed. Then you avoid the implicit association of dimensionality of progress (generally expected to correlate with time) that a "progress bar" indicates. If you have a bunch of different tasks, just put a checklist and indicate when each completes. Even better, put a little note on that checklist to steps that could take a lot longer than others, so users are prepared for it.
I personally hate "progress bars." Unless you're doing some sort of linear task where the rate of completion is roughly constant in 99% of scenarios, I'd prefer they not be there at all.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 24 2016, @12:39AM
They correlate to the user's sense of frustration.