I sell 12-24V fridges with adjustable temperatures on them
More than a handful of times I’ve had customer returns because the fridge is “broken” and when I inquire further they refuse to use a fridge which deviates from the set temperature for any amount of time (even by one or two degrees)
By giving users the affordance of knowing the exact temperature - they’re appalled to realise it’s not a magic black box, and that the compressor kicks in to bring it back to temperature, and kicks out when it reaches it
They no doubt have no issue with their domestic fridge, which does not afford them the ability to see the exact temperature, despite functioning the same under the hood
And then in terms of the 0% vs 1% thing... my preference is to show 0% but keep an animated indicator so you know it's in progress, if you don't have something else that does the same (like showing the current download speed or current frame). Showing 1% done when it's only at 0.0001% done doesn't feel quite right to me.
I have seen animated indicators running forever with no progress so often that I usually assume something went wrong as soon as I see one for more than a couple seconds. Animated spinners are the most fundamental UI element of bloated software that barely works.
Just show the 1% or whatever else that tells the user it's not stuck.
Most of my reporting tools implement similar logic to the python in the article, so handy to keep around for those use cases…
Yes I sit waiting in front of the washer when I do laundry counting down the seconds. Don’t you?
My inner monologue, many times: "How the HELL has it still got 7 minutes, wait 6, ohhhhhh and it's done."
Only until I realized that the time it displayed wasn't accurate enough to do that. Likewise the dishwasher, though that one is kinda nice in that it always overestimates things.
Maybe fast in the beginning and end and slow in the middle, "ease-in-out" or the inverse with sigmoid