Progress is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.
Okay, I may have stolen some of that from The Matrix, but the sentiment is the same. Progress bars drive us to complete things and that’s probably a good thing.
This unassuming creature first came into being at the end of the nineteenth century. Karol Adamiecki, a Polish management researcher, devised a graphical means of displaying production schedules. This so-called harmonogram was used extensively in mills and factories to make processes more efficient.
A similar device, called a Gantt chart, was more popular in the English-speaking world and was most notably applied by General William Crozier to get the most out of munitions manufacture during WW1.
Though we might take process-management charts for granted now, back in the day they blew people’s minds. Just by showing the employees, in a graphical form, how far along a particular project had come, a marked increase in production and efficiency was noted.
For most of the twentieth century, these charts and graphs were standard issue for any manufacturing process. It wasn’t until 1985 that progress bars got a chance to move into their new home, the personal computer! The ‘percent-done progress indicator’ was created by Brad Myers, a professor who was really great at working with human-computer interface. (Much less so at creating clever names for things!)
40 years ago, in the 80s, computers took a god-awfully long time to do anything and without any indication that “computing” was happening, one would never know how far along you were coming with your computations. Once Myers’ progress bars were introduced, I’m sure stress levels across the globe dropped as system administrators could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
Those days are far behind us, these days progress bars are everywhere and they are quietly egging you on in everything you do. Don’t believe me? Let’s take every program that needs to be installed on your computer or mobile device as an example.
So you read about the latest Snap/Insta/Face/TikTok/What/Chat app and you want to give it a try? Okay, first step is to find a download link. Found it? Good… now we wait for it to download. How’s that progressing? All done, good, now you can start installing. 100%, finally. Now to get it started, but first…
let’s create a profile. Name: 20%. Email: 30%. Phone Number: 40%. Confirm your email: 50%. And so on.
So, you’ve entered all of your info and created your user profile and added your least unflattering selfie. That should be enough to make you happy, right? Well… no, because there’s a little box on your profile page that tells you that your user registration is only 80% complete – you need to create a bio to finally be 100% complete.
Should that matter? Should we really care about how an app or website defines ‘complete’? Of course not, but buried deep inside you is an animal urge to fill that bar up and until that’s done, you will forever feel a small but noticeable hollow, right there on your soul.
The creators of these websites don’t just throw these things in to generate existential turmoil – progress bars are there because they are a proven method of driving engagement. Without an endpoint, every journey is meaningless and one does not tend to get very motivated when it comes to exercises in futility. Once you know where you are on your path, how far you have come and how far you have left to go, the task at hand seems at the very least achievable.