No More Pinwheels

September 2nd, 2005
Categories: Interaction, Interface, OS X

In his book “About Face” (at Amazon), Alan Cooper lays out sound reasoning against the use of the cursor as a means of communicating to the user that an application has, as he puts it, gone stupid.

If [a] program must turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the user while it scratches some digital itch, it should make this known through an indicator on its own video real estate, leaving the cursor alone.

About Face, page 211

Cooper points out that wait cursors made sense in the days of cooperative multi-tasking operating systems because when one program gets stupid, they all get stupid. Since no major operating system suffers from that design any longer, wait cursors should be considered a vestigial interface element.

In OS X, I’d like to see the pinwheel wait cursor replaced by window-modal sheets, which are an effective means of communicating that the window is currently scratching an itch without making the user feel like the computer has usurped control of the cursor and they must wait for it to release it.

Preview 3 displays such a sheet when writing user-added keywords to a PDF file:

A window-modal progress sheet

As Cooper says, cursor hinting should be used only to communicate information directly related to cursor-based operations such as the effect of modifier keys on drag-and-drop operations (copy or alias) and the working of pane splitters by displaying a double-headed arrow cursor.

3 Responses to “No More Pinwheels”

  1. Mike Zornek, on September 2nd, 2005 at 6:51 AM Said:

    Funny you should use the Snapz manual to demo this as one of my biggest gripes with Snapz is how when you save your movie it just sits there with the spinning beach ball. I totally agree, for scenarios like these there needs to be a progress bar, preferable with an estimated time of the task.

  2. Membranophonist, on September 2nd, 2005 at 11:09 AM Said:

    Good point, Mike. For tasks of unpredictable duration, the animated spinner could be displayed.

    I haven’t used Snapz extensively, so I haven’t run into that particular problem. A preliminary gripe is that the image capture mode is lacking in feedback as to how exactly to save an image. Double-clicking the selected area is far from obvious.

  3. Tim Germer, on September 6th, 2005 at 12:48 PM Said:

    Please, no more beach ball :)

Leave a Reply