Busy cursors - why?

Question

Can anyone give me a scenario where they think busy cursors are justified? I feel like they're always a bad idea from a user's perspective. Clarification: by busy cursors, I mean when the user can no longer interact with the application, they can only move their hourglass mouse pointer around and whistle a tune.

Answer 1

For example, to indicate that you've clicked on a button, even though it's not done processing the event. If there were not some indication, the user might try to click the button again, causing all manner of badness.

Answer 2

I try to use them on any action that may take from 0.5 to 3 seconds, for longer actions I think progress indicators with enough information should be used.

Answer 3

You show a busy cursor when the user can not do anything until the operation is completed - including exiting the application.

I find it interesting that you don't see busy cursors in Web Browsers - perhaps that why people like them so much.

No, wait, I have a better answer. You show a busy cursor when the computer is thinking.

Answer 4

When one hits the Refresh button on a web browser, busy cursor must appear immediately to tell the user to let them know that a page is being loaded.

I think it was Don't Make Me Think that said that the tolerable loading time for human is zero second.

Google says:

Responsive

It's possible to write code that wins every performance test in the world, but that still sends users in a fiery rage when they try to use it. These are the applications that aren't responsive enough — the ones that feel sluggish, hang or freeze for significant periods, or take too long to process input.

Answer 5

There are two purposes for it:

1. Indicate for the user that something is happening.
2. Indicate for the user that nothing can't be done right now.

Busy cursor is better signal about the operation than nothing. For longer lasting operations something better should be used. For example browsers is still operational when a page is being retrieved and there is even a button to stop the operation. As the user interface is fully functional, there is no need to use busy cursor. However busy cursor can be used even in this kind of situations in the transition phases like when starting the operation or when stopping it.

Answer 6

I think you may well be right: in a decent asynchronous app, you never need to show a busy cursor. The user can always do something even if the big last operation is completing.

That said, sometimes Java apps like Netbeans or Eclipse, or even Visual Studio, hang with no busy cursor and no hope. But in that case, a busy cursor probably wouldn't help much either...but I think you're right: busy cursors are from a non-multithreading era for apps. In Flex apps, for instance, EVERYTHING is automatically event-driven callbacks, so setting a busy cursor would just be meaningless (though possible, of course).

Answer 7

It's not specifically the busy cursor that is important, but it IS important, absolutely, always to give feedback to the user that something is happening in response to their input. It is important to realize that without a busy cursor, progress bar, throbber, flashing button, swirling baton, dancing clown.. it doesn't matter ANYTHING- if you don't have it, and the computer just sits there doing nothing, the computer looks broken to the user.

immediate feedback for every user action is incredibly important.

Answer 8

I noticed with Fedora 8 at least that when an app sets the "busy" cursor, the "busy interactive" one is actually displayed. I guess this is because the system is still responsive to mouse input (like dragging the window etc.). As an aside, selecting the "busy interactive" cursor explicitly on linux is tricky: http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/x_cursors/

Answer 9

The only thing I believe the busy cursor does is it informs the user that ...

I'm not outright ignoring you, I'm just doing something else that may take awhile

Answer 10

I would use them only for quick completing things, like say under half a second. If anything takes longer than that then a progress dialog should popup, or a progress bar should appear in the status bar or somewhere else in the interface.

The user should always be able to cancel the action if it is taking too long to complete.

In response to the comment, the busy cursor would only be visible for the half second or so, as once the progress dialog is up it should change to being one of those "half busy" cursors, or just the normal arrow cursor.

You should avoid having a busy cursor up except in extreme circumstances, and if you think you need one, then think again and redesign.

Answer 11

In summary, I think that the user should be blocked from doing stuff in your app only when the wait interval is very short (2 seconds or less) and the cognitive overhead of doing multi-threading is likely to result in a less stable app. For more detail, see below.

For an operation lasting less than 0.1 second, you don't usually need to go asynchronous or even show an hourglass.

For an operation lasting between 0.1 and 2 seconds, you usually don't need to go asynchronous. Just switch the cursor to the hourglass, then do the work inline. The visual cue is enough to keep the end-user happy.

If the end-user initiates an operation that is going to take just a couple of seconds, he's in a "focused" mode of thinking in which he's subconsciously waiting for the results of his action, and he hasn’t switched his conscious brain out of that particular focus. So blocking the UI - with a visual indicator that this has happened - is perfectly acceptable for such a short period of time.

For an operation lasting more than 2 seconds, you should usually go asynchronous. But even then, you should provide some sort of progress indicator. People find it difficult to concentrate in the absence of stimulation, and 2 seconds is long enough that the end-user is naturally going to move from conscious ‘focused’ activity to conscious ‘waiting’ activity.

The progress indicator gives them something to occupy them while they are in that waiting mode, and also gives the means of determining when they are going to switch back into their ‘focused’ context. The visual cues give the brain something around which to structure those context switches, without demanding too much conscious thought.

Where it gets messy is where you have an operation that usually completes in X time, but occasionally takes Y, where Y is much greater than X. This can happen for remote actions such as reaching across a network. That's when you might need a combination of the above actions. For example, consider displaying an egg-timer for the first 2 seconds and only then bringing in your progress indicator. This avoids wrenching the end-user from the 'focused' context directly to the 'waiting' context without an intermediate step.

Answer 12

While it is absolutely necessary to alert the user that your application is doing something, a busy cursor is only useful for the first few seconds of processing. For a delay of more than about 15-20 seconds, something else must be presented such as a progress bar, status message, message box, whatever. People assume your software has locked up after a minute or so and will try to terminate it. Sometimes, overall visual cues are just as important as a busy cursor.

For example, applications with tabs that do not respond with appropriate highlighting until the operation in the tab completes can be fixed up by updating the tab temporarily until all operations are complete. Sometimes, just a little optimization or refactoring will clean up horrible user interface responsiveness such as this.