this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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I recently had to talk a designer out of implementing a “webpage progress indicator” that was a thin horizontal bar across the top of the page that filled in as you progressed through the content.
A few pages have those. What don't you like about them?
They are bad replicas of school bars. Except you can't use these to scroll the page and they use horizontal progress to express vertical progress. Everything they do could be done more effectively by having a visible scroll bar.
I don't see them as scroll bar replicas; good ones are very narrow but high contrast, to easily offer a compact visual sense of article length -- rather than page length, an important distinction when there are cited sources, recommended articles, and a footer menu. Different functions.
IMO, they should coexist with a well-designed vertical scroll bar.
Unless they were copying it from somewhere else, what were their arguments to implement it? Is it about gamefication of reading an article?
I like it for articles. It shows progress through the text, not down the page, which are two different metrics which can differ wildly.