The Technician

During my time at the interactive portion of SXSW, I was looking for great technical panels on practical ways to improve my technical skills. While I found a bunch of panels that addressed some interesting issues, I don’t think I saw any server side code the entire time I was there. There were a number of great CSS and HTML5 talks, but aside from the PHP workshop that was listed at the wrong time in the booklet, I found no practical talks for backend developers.

Over the past couple years, it seems like there has definitely been a shift in how sxsw views technical talks. Two years ago, there were developers presenting great content on how to structure APIs, write great PHP, and develop iPhone / Android Apps. This year, the php workshop had the incorrect time printed in the booklet. The technical talks this year seemed be designed for the nontechnical. The discussions around scaling included big names quoting scaling statistics that are sure to be taken out of context and read as homily by technical managers everywhere. The Android Developer meetup was almost completely devoid of Android devs, just sharks looking for them, myself included. The panel on the death of the RDBMS painted a rosy picture of what databases could be, but did not include a mention of a single technology that fit the presenter’s pipe dream.

The ubiquitousness of the term social media at SXSW leaves me with one conclusion. SXSW has changed from a gathering that was about people doing cool stuff to a group of people talking about stuff they think is cool right now. There has been a lot of discussion on conversation, but not much conversation on how to create things worth talking about.

A classic UX problems is communicating to users how long they’ll have to wait before their task completes. A spinner or progress bar provides feedback that the system is, in fact, doing something, and how long that task may take. Psychologically, progress bars create tension while progressing, and resolution when completed.

From a technical standpoint, progress bars are black magic. The developer is attempting to estimate a task based on potentially thousands of variables. In the case of a file upload, the developer has to deal with differing network conditions, disk performance, etc, etc, etc. Then they have to write the code to communicate what is happening to the browser. Not a trivial task. However, when executed well, can provide the user with reasonable feedback about their task.

Lately, sites like LinkedIn, Mint.com, and OKCupid have used that same tension to motivate users to completely fill out their profiles. During profile creation, a progress bar is displayed indicating how far the user has come along. Once the user completely fills out their profile, the progress bar hits 100%, and what changes? In most cases, nothing. The progress bar is just a psychological hack to entice users to go through the entire process.

The question is: Exactly how effective is the progress bar at enticing users to fully complete the task at hand? And are they actually worth it.