Rethinking the Progress Bar doesn’t really rethink it so much as prove what should have been obvious; people prefer progress bars that speed up as they reach the end, rather than progress bars that slow down towards the end. Execute your unpredictable-duration activities, like network transfers, at the beginning of your code, and your predictable-duration activities at the end.

I wonder why we’ve never seen progress boxes or regions, that express two simultaneous processes by growing in two (or more) dimensions simultaneously, at different rates. Seems like you could map one dimension to radius and the other to angle, and have a progress region that progresses from a single center point, to a wedge, and finally to a filled circle. Probably too complicated, but I’d love to find a use for that.