[Libreoffice] [UX] Progress bars - convey "this make take some time, dunno how long"

[Christoph Noack]

Hi Thorsten!

Progress bar issue summary: Cannot be solved easily :-) But should it be
solved?

Am Mittwoch, den 17.11.2010, 15:47 +0100 schrieb Thorsten Behrens:
> Hi,
> 
> chatting with some folks yesterday at the OOo congress for business
> and administration, and two users approached me with a problem most
> prevalent when saving to network volumes:

Okay.

> LibO save progress bars [...] stuck at 100% (because all
> xml content is written), but the apps are still unresponsive
> (sometimes for a minute or so).

Not that good ...

> Changing SaveTo_Impl() to use async IO is prolly out of scope for
> 3.3, so another workaround would be to keep the progress bar from
> reaching 100% before all work is finished - see attached patches 
> for a sketchy attempt. Problem here: the progress bar will not move
> either way, it's just not stuck at 100%, but at 90% now.

QUESTIONS

Okay, so we just "move" the problem. To better understand the issue...

      * The patch just changes the progress bar behavior, but the time
        to be waited is the same?

      * The progress bar is the only information - as far as I know,
        there is no percentage completed (on any platform), or?


ISSUES

Two main problems: Users don't know ...
     1. ... how long it will take (the idea of progress bars is to
        provide something which enables people to anticipate the
        duration of the task and to get some rough information on the
        percentage completed)
     2. ... if LibO is still running and will (finally) complete the
        task (no real lockup).

Item 1 cannot be solved - the progress bars (better: the task) will get
stuck, no way to change that (easily).

Item 2 is only partly addressed - only few platforms bring "spinning
progress bars" that visualize some "activity" (Apple, Windows
Vista, ...) if progress bars get stuck for a short time. Although this
is just "psychological magic", it works :-)


IMPACT

So there is no solution that can be addressed with a progress bar ...
but is this a real problem at the moment? How often might that occur to
people who don't know that LibO will finally finish their request? So
how much negative impact does this issue have - in comparison to the
"short-term solution"?

>From my point-of-view, working on a "real" improvement would be better.
But if there is none within the next few months, and quite some users
experience this, then ...


ALTERNATIVE

If (and only for that reason) the save/load process gets stuck for
(e.g.) min. 5 seconds, and there is no way of availability-checking of
the network connection in advance, then we might simply bring up a
message box that says something like "File XYZ is being saved which
requires some time. Please wait ..." (not final, of course).

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| LibreOffice Writer                                                 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                                    |
|                                                                    |
|                                                                    |
|               +--------------------------------+                   |
|               | Saving                         |                   |
|               +--------------------------------+                   |
|               |                                |                   |
|               |  File "Bad-UX-Hack.odt" is     |                   |
|               |  being saved which requires    |                   |
|               |  some time. Please wait ...    |                   |
|               |                                |                   |
|               |           [ Cancel ]           |                   |
|               +--------------------------------+                   |
|                                                                    |
|                                                                    |
|                                                                    |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Saving ########################################################### |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+


A bad and (from UX point-of-view) hacky solution, but it should work
with the given tools we do have (without hacking the status bar, ...).
But, another dialog to be translated. Cancel is optional - but having
such functionality is "good manner". 

That might be an interim (!) "solution".

> Any UX insight on how to best get this across? 

Might that work?

Cheers,
Christoph

PS: By the way, well tagged message :-)