I recently received a new PC at work (that 1GB of RAM just wasn’t cutting it) and today I finally got around to installing Visual Studio 2005. Shortly after I started the install and UAC graciously allowed me through, I saw this dialog:

It’s telling me that it’s doing something, but other than the wait cursor, I don’t know if it is actually doing anything. It may be frozen. It may be in an infinite loop. I just don’t know. Not very user friendly. An updating list of what it’s doing or the constantly updating text showing the current task would work. Even a status bar in marquee mode would be better than nothing at all. At least I know the dialog is actually doing something. Then suddenly a regular progress bar appears with the text “Gathering required information..”:

Great. Now it’s gathering information? What was it doing before when it was in limbo? After it’s done gathering required information, I get a timer telling me the time remaining:

But the time remaining to do what? The “gathering required information” progress bar completed, so it can’t be gathering required information anymore. Now I’m just being shown the time remaining, you know, in case I need to know how much time before I’m shown the next confusing bit of UI.

So first I had 7 seconds remaining, then 9, then 13, then 10, then 15, then 12, then 9, then 10, then 7, and now 0 seconds. Boy, I’m glad that wasn’t confusing or misleading. Not to mention the displayed time remaining didn’t really reflect reality at all. And now I have 0 seconds remaining… and I’ve had 0 seconds remaining for the past 45 seconds…

I’ve talked before about ui foibles involving communicating status via checkboxes, but this is a different beast altogether. This is simply communicating wrong status, communicating incomplete status and communicating no status… all at the same time. You don’t need to tell the user everything. Sometimes you just need to tell them the overall task. Sometimes you need to tell them a little more. But you always need to tell them something valuable. So just remember…

when communicating status to the user, do it extensively, do it truthfully and do it appropriately.