On: Progress bars still lie

[admax88q]

If you can reliably break down your complex flow into a tree of checkboxes, you could just as easily render a truthful progress bar based upon how many sub tasks are done.

[eru → admax88q]

Yes, but that bar would still get hung intermittently whenever a specific task took a long time.

[karottenreibe → eru]

How is the checkbox thing any different? If one task blocks progress, the tree also doesn't update

[coldtea → karottenreibe]

At least I know what it is doing at the moment its blocked (and in many cases I can tell whether that is justified to take N time or not).

With a progress bar I don't know anything.

[eru → karottenreibe]

I don't know whether it _will_ be any different, but there was some speculation about that:

> If the users can see the detailed tasks, maybe they will be less ticked off by a jumpy progress bar.

[TeMPOraL → karottenreibe]

Context. You see not just the thing currently executing, but also the things remaining to be executed - which allows you to mentally gauge which of them may slow down.