Week 3 Session: The Throbber

Week 3. The indeterminate spinner communicates only that something is happening. This week asks what the silence around that is for.

1 March 2027

The thresholds in week 2 told you which affordance a delay gets. This week takes the one that says least and asks what it is doing.

Myers is the founding argument for telling people how far along they are, and it is worth reading for how modest the evidence behind it is. Bouch, Kuchinsky and Bhatti come at it from the other side, with people rating web latency under controlled conditions, and find that what a person will tolerate moves with context rather than sitting at a fixed number.

Between them is the question this week is about. If you know the duration and you show a spinner, you have withheld something. Sometimes that is the right call. You need to be able to say when.

In the workshop#

Bring three spinners you met this week. For each, work out whether the system knew the duration. Where it did, write the sentence the designer would have had to say out loud to justify hiding it. Some of those sentences are reasonable and some are not, and reading them aloud is how you tell.

But wait, there’s more#

The macOS spinning beachball cursor is the only indicator in common use that you cannot dismiss, cannot cancel and cannot interpret. It appears when an application stops answering the window server, so the component reporting the problem is the one part of the system still working. Watch for it this week and note what you do with your hands while it spins.