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?
有多少人在桌前感到無聊, 一天有幾個小時、 一週有幾天、一年有幾週、 一生有幾年是感到無聊的?
[Small thing. Big idea.]
〔小東西。大點子。〕
[Daniel Engber on the Progress Bar]
〔丹尼爾恩伯談進度條〕
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.
進度條只是電腦上的一個指標, 表示在該裝置中有事情在發生。 多年來最經典的進度條 就是水平的橫條。 這要追溯回在電腦出現之前的版本, 在帳簿上,人們會由左至右 將水平橫條給塗滿, 來顯示在工廠中的一項 工作任務已經完成了多少。 這和螢幕上的進度條是一樣的。
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?
七○年代時, 所謂的「軟體危機」發生了, 突然間,電腦變得更複雜, 也更快速,從設計的觀點來說, 大家都沒準備好。 人們會用不同的方式 來使用完成百分比指標。 可能會有圖像式的倒數時鐘, 或是有一排星號 從左向右漸漸填滿螢幕。 但沒有人對這些東西 做過系統性的調查 來試著了解: 它們究意對電腦前的使用者 有什麼體驗上的影響?
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!"
這位研究生布萊德米爾斯 在 1985 年決定研究這個主題。 他發現,完成度百分比指標 是否有給予你正確的完成度百分比 其實不重要。 重要的是,是否有這個指標。 看到它在那裡, 就能讓人感覺比較好, 那是最讓人驚訝的發現。 他對這種指標用途有很多想法。 也許,它能很有效地讓人放鬆。 也許,它能讓人離開他們的機器, 在這段等候時間內去做些其他的事。 他們會看一眼並說: 「喔,進度條完成了一半。 還要花五分鐘。 所以現在我還有 五分鐘可以去傳真。」 或是去做其他 1985 年的人會做的事。 以上兩點都不對。 當你看見進度條時, 它會像牽引波束一樣 鎖住你的注意力, 它會把等候的體驗轉變成 你看到你面前有個 讓人興奮的故事正在展開: 不知怎麼的,那些你很挫折地 花費在等候電腦做事的時間, 被重新概念化,成為: 「有進度!喔!有大事在發生!」
[Progress...]
〔進度…〕
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,一旦你把進度條想成是 用來減輕等候痛苦的東西, 那麼你就可以開始玩些 心理學上的小把戲了。
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.
如果你的進度條是等速的- 假設那真的是在電腦中發生的狀況- 人的感受會是:它在變慢。 我們會感到無聊。 現在,你可以開始加快它, 讓它顯得比實際上移動得更快, 讓它在一開始移動得 比較快,像爆衝的速度。 那讓人興奮,會覺得: 「喔!真的有什麼事在發生了!」 接著在過程中再換回 速度自然增加的進度條, 你假設人會把焦點放在 時間一分一秒過去- 他們試圖看著草在生長, 他們試圖看著一鍋水,等著水滾, 而你只是試著讓那過程 在和以前相比時 能比較不無聊、比較不痛苦、 比較不讓人挫折。
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,進度條至少能給予你 開始與結束的視覺化呈現, 表示你在朝一個目標前進。 我想,在某些意義上, 它減輕了對死亡的恐懼。 這樣說太過頭了?