Correct way to textually report the remaining time on a long running process?

Posted by Ryan on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ryan
Published on 2010-06-17T19:54:24Z Indexed on 2010/06/17 20:03 UTC
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language-agnostic

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time

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user-interface

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progress

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time-estimation

So you have a long running process, perhaps with a progress bar, and you want a text estimate of the remaining time, eg: "5 minutes remaining" "30 seconds remaining" etc.

If you don't actually want to report clock time (due to accuracy or resolution or update-rate issues) but want to stick to the text summary, what is the correct paradigm?

Is "one minute" left displayed from 0 to 60 seconds? or from 1:00 to 1:59? Say there's 1:35 Left - is that "2 minutes remaining" or "1 minute remaining"?

Do you just pare it down to "A few minutes left" when you're less than 3 minutes?

What is the preferred (least user-frustrating) method?

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