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.”

4 Comments

  • I just shared this same comment with my team last week after someone said 'lets put it in the status bar...'

  • 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.

  • 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.



  • Hi,

    I am no fan either.

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