Matthew ".NET 247" Reynolds

Matthew Reynolds... software development consultant, author, speaker and trainer

I'm not a big fan of status bars...

...I find them tricky to interact with programatically, and no one ever looks at them anyway, but this morning, this quote from Chris Sells' Windows Forms Programming in C# really ticked me:

Pg 106: “According to legent, Microsoft did a usability study [of the status bar] awareing people $50 if they would look under their chair, putting the notification for this award in the status bar.  The $50 went unclaimed during the testing.”

Posted: Dec 05 2003, 08:14 AM by mjreynolds | with 6 comment(s)

Comments

Greg Robinson said:

I just shared this same comment with my team last week after someone said 'lets put it in the status bar...'
# December 5, 2003 7:49 AM

Andrew said:

People put all kinds of things in places they don't belong.

I particularly like the status bar in IE, as it shows me where links point to.

If everything is going smoothly, there is little reason to look at the status bar.
# December 5, 2003 9:05 AM

TrackBack said:

# December 5, 2003 7:25 PM

MartinJ said:

I also like the status bar on some windows. And, I don't like it when Windows decides that I must not have really wanted to see it. I use that sucker in Explorer a lot: to see quicker than the tooltip how big a file is, and to see what folder is currently getting searched when finding something.
# December 10, 2003 2:25 AM

Rana said:


Hi,
I am no fan either.
# December 13, 2003 2:42 PM

Tony Park said:

XP seems to have dumbed down a lot of the information that could be available in status bars/hover information and it's a constant irritation that it doesn't behave consistently. My personal favourite status bar is at:

http://www.statbar.nl/ - Definitely one worth checking out, although it takes a little customising to get right.

p.s. - Interesting site you've got here, came across it after I noticed the URL on replying to your freelancer's post. I'll be back :)
# December 16, 2003 2:38 PM
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