Habitually Good

While Google has been talking about how they have made things faster on Gmail, and how much quicker it is to load now, there is another little change that they have made to Gmail, which is much more useful.

It is the addition of a progress bar where there used to be a non-helpful, red, “Loading…” label. This label was useless. You didn’t know how much more time it would take to load, or if the connectivity was poor, it would simply stay forever. Now, however, it is much better since they are following one of the most common tips concerning usability. Take a look at the screen shot:

Use a progress indicator when performing a time consuming transaction. The reason why this is so important is that it takes the user’s attention away from the time it takes to load the page (unless it is taking too long).

And to top it all, Gmail does feel faster now.

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