Wait Indicator

jclark58

I am finding that if an operation such as a process or query takes more than a few seconds, users have a tendency to press keys and click in links and buttons, thinking that the software has frozen or gone to sleep or something and maybe needs to be woken up.

Operating systems get around this with the hourglass cursor etc, but a web user needs to be trained to be patient and look at the progress bar or the wall or something.

Would it be possible to display some sort of progress or wait indicator such as the "Loading" screen displayed on startup?

(A greyed out back ground of the current form and the Loading display would seem to be the way to go esp if the progress indicator activity could be linked to actual activity in the system.)

Rem

I agree, that would be good!

I think I have made the mistake myself and as a result there was no response from the system and I had to kill the session (wich, ofcourse, a user never would have done and then started to complain ..)

A %-counter would be great, but perhaps hard to implement!

/Rem

PEFS

EXT JS 2.0 has several progress bars that are now available.

http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/simple-widgets/progress-bar.html

Maybe this is something that Aware can integrate in the next release.

ab042

I have the same problem. Users click and re-click because they are not sure if the click took.

Two simple changes would make me very happy.

#1) Make any button or menu clicked change to a blinking word "Processing..." and change it back when the process is completed. This would leave no question in the users mind they clicked the option. So the button "Submit" would change to a blinking "Processing.." if clicked.

#2) And the most helpful suggestion would be to place a RED blinking "Processing..." right justified on the status bar anytime a menu item, button, dynamic record drop down, or any process is started and clear the process wording once the item is displayed would be very helpful to me. Most of the time it is so fast this doesn't apply, but for the times it takes longer for whatever reason this would be VERY HELPFUL and help 99% of my users and stop support calls to us.

I would also suggest a "Turn off 'Processing'" message on the General Tab of the Visual Perspectives just like the Turn Off 'Powered By' so if someone does not want this feature they can turn it off.

ab042

Bump, anything ever resolved on this?

aware_support

No, not yet.

jclark58

Thanks for th response, however it would be useful if we could have some indication of your attitude to this request, whether it has been listed for consideration and what sort of timeframe we might hear something more etc..

ie. "No not yet" is a bit terse

John

pbrad

I agree that at least having the cursor turns to an hourglass during processing would be really nice.

Pete

aware_support

Apologies for the terse reply. Well, this feature is not easy at all and the browser already provides a progress bar. All desktop applications obviously have the hour-glass cursor but Aware IM is a web application using HTTP protocol and things are unfortunately painfully hard with HTTP sometimes. Not to say, that this feature is impossible to implement, but hard. At this stage we can't say when it is going to be available. If there is enough votes from our users for it we may re-consider this.

jclark58

Thanks for that response. Yes I appreciate the difficulty in a standard html environment. THis issue is being driven by problems with user behaviour which keeps up on my priority list. Does Ajax provide any advantages? Something like the Loading screen that appears after login? How is this done?

aware_support

Yes, this would have to be done with AJAX - this means that we would need to change all existing non-AJAX server calls to use AJAX and also implement the new framework. Not an easy task!