UI tip: maybe don't round percentages to 0% or 100%

There is an inverse to this though<p>I sell 12-24V fridges with adjustable temperatures on them<p>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 <i>any</i> amount of time (even by one or two degrees)<p>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<p>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

Might be easier not to round at all, only take the floor. Then you never get to 100% until you&#x27;re actually at 100%. You never get to 50% until you&#x27;re actually at 50%.<p>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&#x27;s in progress, if you don&#x27;t have something else that does the same (like showing the current download speed or current frame). Showing 1% done when it&#x27;s only at 0.0001% done doesn&#x27;t feel quite right to me.

I agree, and in the space I spend most of my time in regulatory compliance, the adage ‘its not done until its done’ applies, so showing 100 is almost never helpful unless it actually is absolutely complete.<p>Most of my reporting tools implement similar logic to the python in the article, so handy to keep around for those use cases…

Counting down too. My clothes washer will count down from 1 minute left to 0 minutes left and then I have to wait for a minute for it to actually reach zero. Why can’t 1 be :59 to 0 instead of 1:59 to 1? And 0 be actually zero?<p>Yes I sit waiting in front of the washer when I do laundry counting down the seconds. Don’t you?

Could use some non-linear transformation to not be &quot;stuck&quot; too long on 1% and 99%. I.e. reaching 2% in ui while actual progress is still below 0.01.<p>Maybe fast in the beginning and end and slow in the middle, &quot;ease-in-out&quot; or the inverse with sigmoid

Ah yes. I vividly remember Windows file transfer dialogs saying 100% completed while clearly still hard at work doing something.