I’m writing an application that deals with the network and the hard drive. For the network portion, the application measures in bits per second, while the disk portion measures in bytes per second. This becomes an issue as they both are abbreviated b/s or bps everywhere I’ve seen. How could I inform the user that one means bits per second, while the other means bytes per second?
If I were writing a specification, I could just add a footnote, but as this is an application, I can’t do that.
So, my question is How do I tell a user that one means bits per second while the other means bytes per second and how would I style the lettering (i.e. megabinarybytes is MiB, but what is megabinarybits)?
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How do I tell a user that one means bits per second while the other
means bytes per second and how would I style the lettering
Seems like this is one of those things that you get to decide as the designer of the program. There are lots of options, including but not limited to:
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spell it out: Eliminate the ambiguity by simply writing “bytes/sec” or “bits/sec”.
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tooltips: User hovers the cursor over any of the places in the program where an abbreviation for a measurement is used, and a tooltip appears displaying the unit name spelled out.
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help: Describe the units of measure in online help.
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choose one: Pick one unit and use it everywhere.
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user chooses: Why can’t the user click on any measurement in the program and get a choice of what units to use?
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The abbreviations for bits and bytes are differentiated by their case: lower case (b) means bits and upper case (B) means bytes.
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If you are writing the entire application yourself, why not just normalize all the messages to use the same unit?
The engineer in me would also ask if that is useful information at all to be presenting to the user? If they don’t know what it means, then what are they going to use it for?
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