Conveying important information

In 2015 I had to spend a number of weeks visiting one of our local hospital’s intensive care units. On one of my visits I got to thinking about the interfaces of the various monitoring machines. There were machines from a range of manufacturers and of varying ages but the display of information was universally simple and minimal.

For the main monitoring system, despite the variety of data collected, it only showed the 2, 3, or maybe 4, variables which were most appropriate for each patient. For those who have seen or developed a organisation or system dashboard it might be surprising that they haven’t aimed for the fancy, flashy, information-dense type of display which are common in software.

The reason for this

User-friendly progress indicators

I have a theory, which I’d like to share, about a way to make percentage progress indicators more user-friendly. When I say “percentage progress indicators” I’m talking about any UI element (text, progress bar, graphic, etc.) which indicates the progress of any operation as a percentage. The operation could by anything, such as: a file transfer, data import/export, progress through a series of forms, etc. Obviously, the indicated progress is important, so I believe that we should massage the truth to make sure we don’t send the wrong message to the user.

For starters, let’s consider an operation which has more than 300 individual steps. It’s not until