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winformsuser-interfaceusabilityprogress-bar

Multi-segment winforms progress bar?

I'm wondering it this is a really bad usability idea, so I'm open to feedback.

I need to perform two steps on a large number of items, with step 2 starting any time after step 1 has completed. However, Step 1 for Item 2 can begin any time after Step 1/Item 1 has finished, and even while step 2/Item 1 is going on.

Is a multi-segment progress bar a bad idea for the consumer? For example (what I'm picturing), the following form would display that step 1 has been done on 75% of items, but step 2 has only been performed on 50% (I intended the brown to be blue or something nicer, but couldn't get it right in my photo editor).

Unified Progressbar
(source: trycatchfinally.net)

The way I was considering doing it before was this, but I don't know if that's more of less clear to the end user, since the activity timeframe of the bars is overlapping:

alt text
(source: trycatchfinally.net)

Any feedback on which makes more sense to the user? If the first image is better, is there a control out there that does this?

Solution

  • Does the user actually care when step 1 completes? If step 2 always comes after step 1, can you not just display the progress bar for step 2 and not worry about displaying the progress of step 1 at all? The work is only "complete" when step 2 finishes anyway...

    Alternatively, you could combine the progress bar into one. Just double the total number of "items" to process and increment the progress bar once when step one completes and once more when step 2 completes.

    Unless I misunderstood something...