No to the Flashy

Here's an example of a program that among other things, is attempting to inform you of what it's doing via some status labels on its main screen. It's got a Start time - OK, fair enough. It's got a Time elapsed status - again, useful info. But where it starts losing me is the Objects scanned, and especially the current Object its scanning.

It's not obvious from the picture but as this program is doing its thing, it literally flashes the number of objects its scanned, and the current object its scanning so fast that its impossible to read them as they go by. I can't imagine a more useless feature for an end user.



What's the point in wasting precious time and energy showing you something that doesn't really mean anything? And when I say wasting energy, I mean literally. It takes extra CPU cycles and consumes extra power to send something to the user interface - especially when it has to refresh the view at such a fast rate. It may not seem like a lot, but imagine that Windows Defender is being run on millions of computers world wide. And I'm not just picking on poor Windows Defender. Many other programs have this poor design choice in the Windows, Mac, and Linux worlds.

So, designers of software, if it makes you feel better to see what your program is doing behind the scenes in debug mode, feel free. But when you release the program to the world at large, hide that feature.

Less is more.

-Demanding