What do FNB and Microsoft have in common?

First National Bank (FNB) has joined Microsoft at the receiving end of geeky jokes about progress bars, thanks to a video poking fun at the loading bar used on FNB’s website.

In a bit of well-received techie webcast comedy, one Graeme Pyle has uploaded a video to YouTube which exposes the FNB website loading bar for the innocuous falsehood it is.

The video is also somewhat educational — albeit at the expense of FNB’s web team — especially for those who have never used Google Chrome to step through JavaScript.

From reading the comments on his video, activity indicator design is actually quite serious business, though we’re not quite sure where it ranks on the trollbait scale of “how much better is Lisp and/or Erlang than Python” to “Vi rules, Emacs drools”.

We asked FNB about the video and Mark Appalsamy, head of sales at FNB Digital Banking, confirmed that the progress bar is merely meant to indicate that there is activity, but does not represent the actual point-in-time progress of the activity.

Why not just use a spinning wheel indicator rather than a progress bar?

“FNB opted to put a percentage indicator as it is a well known and widely understood graphic that people can relate to,” said Appalsamy. “It helps people to understand that something is happening, or being processed in the background.”

More SA website news

Free State Online website down

Biggest mobile websites in South Africa

IT guy hijacks website, blackmails client in SA

Bitcoin coming to thousands of SA websites

SA’s top websites – then and now