"Progress bars just need to reassure the user that progress is being made."<br>Ah, and there's the problem. Much of the time, they just don't do that. <br><br>Instead of an Overall Progress bar that most apps use, I'd much rather see a list of tasks, with an Individual Task Progress bar. What tends to happen is that one task will take a crazy amount of time compared to the others, and you don't see the bar move at all for several minutes. If you could see the task progress, you would know that the task is taking a long time, and the app isn't just hung up in an infinite loop or doing nothing at all.