The percentages are shown on the left side:



They should be displayed on the right side, because you are interested first of all in the current load:

I like the solution.

Is there anything in the HIG about it?

hook wrote:I like the solution.

Is there anything in the HIG about it?

No there isn't, we don't have an HIG for charts yet.

Currently, we have only a place-holder for diagrams in the HIG pages. So yes, it is an important question.

But I disagree with right-hand captions because this axis is reserved for a second variable with different scaling (e.g. CPU load left plus memory load right). If your argument is to focus on the current data: it is shown in the legend below the graph. If you have some Gestalt law in mind: maybe, but there are a lot of interfering laws .

And in any case, I'm sure it's possible to have the diagram arranged from left to right, i.e. the current value is shown at x=0 the oldest at x=maxwidth and the graph movement is flipped. That might look weird and needs to get tested.

Heiko Tietze wrote:If your argument is to focus on the current data: it is shown in the legend below the graph.

By current data I mean not just instant values, but the last few seconds. In the case of CPU it's not so bad - the scale is permanent, but in the case of network speed the scale is variable, and I have to look on the left to see the scale values, and while I am doing this the scale may change.

blindvic wrote:...in the case of network speed the scale is variable, and I have to look on the left to see the scale values, and while I am doing this the scale may change may change.

Okay, this use case is comprehensible. Personally, I would appreciate a fix scaling for network band width. But if you keep the scaling as it is, captions on the right axis are not the best solution, IMHO.

This might be controversial, but are the scales on the CPU & Memory graphs really needed?

Wouldn't it be enough to have the feint grey horizontal lines across the graph every 20% exactly as they are now but without the numbers on the 'Y' axis at all, making it a bit less cluttered? Everyone knows that the top of those two graphs is 100% - you could have just a '100%' at the top of the 'Y' axis to clarify that if needed. Personally, i find the graphs only give me a rough idea what the CPU & Memory values have been, I can't read it incredibly accurately (to the nearest 5-10%?) and the instant values are underneath anyway.

I can see why you'd need a variable scale on the network graph though so my suggestion doesn't apply to that.

ken300 wrote:This might be controversial, but are the scales on the CPU & Memory graphs really needed?

Wouldn't it be enough to have the feint grey horizontal lines across the graph every 20% exactly as they are now but without the numbers on the 'Y' axis at all, making it a bit less cluttered? Everyone knows that the top of those two graphs is 100% - you could have just a '100%' at the top of the 'Y' axis to clarify that if needed. Personally, i find the graphs only give me a rough idea what the CPU & Memory values have been, I can't read it incredibly accurately (to the nearest 5-10%?) and the instant values are underneath anyway.

I can see why you'd need a variable scale on the network graph though so my suggestion doesn't apply to that.

Actually, I'd go even further: I'd remove the horizontal lines, too! Just put "100%" at the top. As you're saying: The absolute numbers are not really relevant. What's relevant is only whether the graph is going up or down or remains constant, and the current percentage with is shown below the graph.

As for the network speed: Actually I think that the adaptive scale is more confusing than helpful, because one always has to read the scale before one is able to interpret the graph. What I'd suggest is either setting the maximum network speed manually, or always using the historical maximum speed as the "100%" so that once the actual maximum transfer rate has been reached once, the scale remains constant.

Using the historical maximum network speed as the default for 100% sounds like a really good idea - very user friendly and that's what I would want to know!

Might it be worth having the option of setting the maximum speed manually too if a user wants to, for example for those users that know what their max speed is & want to setup a new installation manually so that they know exactly what scale the graph's at?

ken300 wrote:Using the historical maximum network speed as the default for 100% sounds like a really good idea - very user friendly and that's what I would want to know!

Might it be worth having the option of setting the maximum speed manually too if a user wants to, for example for those users that know what their max speed is & want to setup a new installation manually so that they know exactly what scale the graph's at?

Yes, having both options would make sense!
Manually setting it would be useful for your connection at home, while the historical max would be useful for wifis of unknown capacity, for example.

Then please let's have a checkbox to enable the lines for every 20%... A bit more accurate reading of the graph would be nice to have.

My vote would be to keep the grey horizontal lines at 20% intervals on all of the graphs even if the numbers disappeared.

To my mind they don't cause a problem, they're not ugly (in fact they make the graph look a bit more like a graph & not just a white rectangle) and they'd help when i was trying to judge 'is that nearer 40% or 60%?'.

ken300 wrote:My vote would be to keep the grey horizontal lines at 20% intervals on all of the graphs even if the numbers disappeared.

To my mind they don't cause a problem, they're not ugly (in fact they make the graph look a bit more like a graph & not just a white rectangle) and they'd help when i was trying to judge 'is that nearer 40% or 60%?'.

Agreed

ken300 wrote:This might be controversial, but are the scales on the CPU & Memory graphs really needed?

I'd vote against removing the scaling labels. It works here because you know the maximum or you can read the actual value below the graph, but diagrams should always be labelled. It would be just a bad practice to hide it.

Heiko,

It works here because you know the maximum or you can read the actual value below the graph, but diagrams should always be labelled. It would be just a bad practice to hide it.

I agree that diagrams or graphs in general should be labelled in a way that makes them easily understood but if, as you say removing the labels "works here", and these graphs can be understood without those labels, then why make things more cluttered by including them when they aren't really needed?