<story><title>User Interface Design: Rules of Thumb</title><url>https://mannhowie.com/ui-design-web</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>happytoexplain</author><text>Spinner vs progress bar is not short vs long operation, it&amp;#x27;s non-progressive vs progressive operation (though you may opt for a spinner if a progressive operation is &lt;i&gt;consistently, predictably&lt;/i&gt; very short).&lt;p&gt;In the software world, designers need to be engineers (or work very closely with engineers, very early in the process). We recently had designers give us a nice looking progressive indicator for a non-progressive operation that &lt;i&gt;happened&lt;/i&gt; to take a somewhat predictable amount of time. Business loved the look and visual feedback. Then we got use cases where the operation could be instantaneous. They didn&amp;#x27;t want to skip the progress animation because they liked how it made the app feel like it was doing something, and also if the user got the result instantly, it was &amp;quot;jarring&amp;quot;. So now, even if the operation finishes instantly, we show the animation, wasting the user&amp;#x27;s time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CharlesW</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Spinner vs progress bar is not short vs long operation, it&amp;#x27;s non-progressive vs progressive operation…&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spinners are typically used for &amp;quot;indeterminate&amp;quot; operations while progress bars are typically used for &amp;quot;determinate&amp;quot; operations¹.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Progressive&amp;quot; is a less useful adjective here because indeterminate operations progress too, and it&amp;#x27;s just that their total duration can&amp;#x27;t be usefully estimated.&lt;p&gt;And as you note these aren&amp;#x27;t hard-and-fast rules, and a spinner is generally a perfectly fine choice for short determinate operations.&lt;p&gt;¹ Progress bar controls typically have an indeterminate flavor too, and these can be mixed. For example, you&amp;#x27;ll typically see an indeterminate form of a progress bar until a total duration can be estimated, at which point the progress bar will change to its determinate form.</text></comment>
<story><title>User Interface Design: Rules of Thumb</title><url>https://mannhowie.com/ui-design-web</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>happytoexplain</author><text>Spinner vs progress bar is not short vs long operation, it&amp;#x27;s non-progressive vs progressive operation (though you may opt for a spinner if a progressive operation is &lt;i&gt;consistently, predictably&lt;/i&gt; very short).&lt;p&gt;In the software world, designers need to be engineers (or work very closely with engineers, very early in the process). We recently had designers give us a nice looking progressive indicator for a non-progressive operation that &lt;i&gt;happened&lt;/i&gt; to take a somewhat predictable amount of time. Business loved the look and visual feedback. Then we got use cases where the operation could be instantaneous. They didn&amp;#x27;t want to skip the progress animation because they liked how it made the app feel like it was doing something, and also if the user got the result instantly, it was &amp;quot;jarring&amp;quot;. So now, even if the operation finishes instantly, we show the animation, wasting the user&amp;#x27;s time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lelandfe</author><text>&amp;gt; though you may opt for a spinner if a progressive operation is consistently, predictably very short&lt;p&gt;For greater guidance on this, the Nielsen Norman Group spake thusly:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Use a progress indicator for any action that takes longer than about 1.0 second.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;[A looped loading animation] should be reserved for actions that take between 2-10 seconds. For anything that takes less than 1 second to load, it is distracting to use a looped animation, because users cannot keep up with what happened and might feel anxious about whatever flashed on the screen&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Generally, percent-done progress indicators should be used for longer processes that take 10 or more seconds.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nngroup.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;progress-indicators&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nngroup.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;progress-indicators&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>