How many people are bored at their desk for how many hours every day and how many days a week and how many weeks a year for how many years in their life?
有多少人对他们的 电脑桌面感到厌烦, 每天烦多少个小时, 每个礼拜烦多少天, 每年烦多少个礼拜, 一辈子烦多少年?
[Small thing. Big idea.]
[小东西,大创意]
[Daniel Engber on the Progress Bar]
[进度条的故事 ——丹尼尔.恩伯尔]
The progress bar is just an indicator on a computer that something's happening inside the device. The classic one that's been used for years is a horizontal bar. I mean, this goes back to pre-computer versions of this on ledgers, where people would fill in a horizontal bar from left to right to show how much of a task they had completed at a factory. This is just the same thing on a screen.
进度条是电脑中的指示工具, 用于显示设备中正在进行的任务。 其中最经典的,用了很多年的, 就是水平进度条。 甚至在电脑诞生前就开始用了, 在账簿中,人们将水平条填色, 来显示工厂里已经完成的任务。 这跟屏幕上的进度条是一回事。
Something happened in the 70s that is sometimes referred to as "the software crisis," where suddenly, computers were getting more complicated more quickly than anyone had been prepared for, from a design perspective. People were using percent-done indicators in different ways. So you might have a graphical countdown clock, or they would have a line of asterisks that would fill out from left to right on a screen. But no one had done a systematic survey of these things and tried to figure out: How do they actually affect the user's experience of sitting at the computer?
在70年代发生了一些事, 后来我们称之为“软件危机”, 突然之间,计算机变得越来越复杂, 发展得越来越快, 超出了所有人的预期, 尤其从设计的角度来看。 人们用不同的形式 来显示已经完成的百分比。 有图形化的倒计时钟, 或者在屏幕上从左至右 显示的一排星号符。 但是没有人对此 进行过系统性的调查, 来搞清楚: 到底这些进度条对电脑用户体验 有什么实际影响?
This graduate student named Brad Myers, in 1985, decided he would study this. He found that it didn't really matter if the percent-done indicator was giving you the accurate percent done. What mattered was that it was there at all. Just seeing it there made people feel better, and that was the most surprising thing. He has all these ideas about what this thing could do. Maybe it could make people relax effectively. Maybe it would allow people to turn away from their machine and do something else of exactly the right duration. They would look and say, "Oh, the progress bar is half done. That took five minutes. So now I have five minutes to send this fax," or whatever people were doing in 1985. Both of those things are wrong. Like, when you see that progress bar, it sort of locks your attention in a tractor beam, and it turns the experience of waiting into this exciting narrative that you're seeing unfold in front of you: that somehow, this time you've spent waiting in frustration for the computer to do something, has been reconceptualized as: "Progress! Oh! Great stuff is happening!"
1985年,这位名叫 布拉德·梅耶斯的本科毕业生, 决定研究一下这件事。 他发现进度条 能否准确显示完成百分比 并不十分重要。 重要的是,要有一个 进度条摆在那里。 能看到它就会让人们感觉好点, 这结论真让人意外。 关于进度条到底能做什么, 他得出了一些结论。 比如能够有效地让人放松。 可能它能让人们在等待的同时 离开电脑去干点别的。 他们会看一眼说, “哦,才过了一半, 用了5分钟。 所以我还有5分钟可以 去发个传真。” 或者干些在1985年的 办公室会干的事。 但事实并非如此。 其实,当你看着进度条的时候, 滚动的光束会吸引你的注意力。 它改变了等待的体验, 把它变成了一件 让你兴奋的新鲜事: 原本你在沮丧的等待 电脑完成某件事, 却被重新解读为: “进行中!啊! 美妙的事正在进行中呢!”
[Progress...]
[进程中……]
But once you start thinking about the progress bar as something that's more about dulling the pain of waiting, well, then you can start fiddling around with the psychology.
但是当你意识到进度条 不仅仅可以降低 等待时的焦虑的时候, 你就可以来运用 一些心理学的技巧了。
So if you have a progress bar that just moves at a constant rate -- let's say, that's really what's happening in the computer -- that will feel to people like it's slowing down. We get bored. Well, now you can start trying to enhance it and make it appear to move more quickly than it really is, make it move faster at the beginning, like a burst of speed. That's exciting, people feel like, "Oh! Something's really happening!" Then you can move back into a more naturalistic growth of the progress bar as you go along. You're assuming that people are focusing on the passage of time -- they're trying to watch grass grow, they're trying to watch a pot of water, waiting for it to boil, and you're just trying to make that less boring, less painful and less frustrating than it was before.
比如你看到一条匀速运行的进度条, 我们假设它真实反映了 任务的进行情况, 但是人们会觉得它在变慢。 我们会等得有些不耐烦。 好吧,那你就尝试改善一下, 让它走得比实际运行得更快一些, 让它在开始的时候快一些, 像在加速一样。 人们会感到激动, “哦!进展的很快嘛!” 然后再让进度条恢复到真实的速度, 让它继续。 假定人们会注意到时间的流逝, 他们会尝试观察草的生长, 尝试观察一壶水,等待它烧开, 你所做的就是让过程不那么无聊, 跟以前相比, 不那么痛苦和沮丧。
So the progress bar at least gives you the vision of a beginning and an end, and you're working towards a goal. I think in some ways, it mitigates the fear of death. Too much?
所以说进度条至少给我们 一个开始和结束的直观体现, 让你感到自己一直在 朝一个目标努力。 我觉得从某个角度讲, 它减轻了对死亡的恐惧。 说的太夸张了?