10 ms·
I wonder whether this is not an example of a UI interaction which is slow on purpose, to emphasize how much work the OS is doing for you. TaxAct and TurboTax,
by patio11 10y ago
I wonder whether this is not an example of a UI interaction which is slow on purpose, to emphasize how much work the OS is doing for you.
TaxAct and TurboTax, for example, both operate on (in the typical case) kilobyte scale data requiring trivial math. They also make both saving the data and calculating taxes take 5+ wall-clock seconds when they actually require milliseconds and nanoseconds respectively. This is largely because (non-technical) users don't trust your computer did the math right if the answer comes back instantly. (I also suspect there is an element of "Wait if it is so easy to calculate my taxes why am I paying you to do that.")
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoThis reminds me of how some PlayStation game's developers complained that they were required by Sony to add a false multi-second delay to their game's save routine, so the user would have enough time to read the mandatory warning not to turn off the console. Their game in fact saved so quickly there needn't be a warning at all.
- matheusmoreira 10y agoThis is really interesting. I read that warning every time I save and I never noticed the delay. For some reason, it doesn't bother me like the archive utility animations. I guess it's because saving the game is a such ritualized action. I wonder what other requirements Sony imposed on developers. Maybe they have their own video game-oriented human interface guidelines. Do you have a source for this information? I found plenty of technical documents and SDKs but nothing about interfaces.
- chipperyman573 10y agoKind of related, the reason there's a "Press A to play game" on xbox (and a lot of PC ports) is because Microsoft requires a button press every x seconds, and if the game takes too long to load before the menu appears, pressing A will circumvent that requirement.
- matheusmoreira 10y ago>Microsoft requires a button press every x seconds What is the rationale behind such a requirement? >if the game takes too long to load before the menu appears, pressing A will circumvent that requirement. Does this mean those screens/videos that get displayed after the game starts and before the menu appears are required by Microsoft to be skippable? If that's the case then it's good UX design in my opinion. I think those things are an unacceptable waste of player's time; I hate them so much I rename the files in the game's directory so it will fail to show them.
- jamesgeck0 10y agoIt doesn't mean they have to be skippable, just that they can't drag on too long.
- hawkice 10y agoPresumably so they can see how long it takes to handle input events, because that's a good proxy for whether the application is responsive or not. What they don't want is the game freezing. But that's harder to measure directly.
- frik 10y agoN64 had press Start to start, years before XBox was even a thing. And yes, many/most PC ports are of very low quality. Gone are the days of PC-first Triple-A games with forgotten features like Quick-save/load, LAN-multiplayer, Map-editor, official Mod-support. These days, these ports feel like they started porting two months before release, done by two coders. All these console-ish things like messages "don't turn off your system" (yah-right), press a key to start (yup), save-points (wtf), always-on single player (...)
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoThe N64 in turn took the start screen thing from the Super Famicom and Famicom before it. I assume title screens are just that: title screens, and the developers want to show off. Maybe it's a legacy of arcade machines, though.
- arghIdontwantto 10y agoCan only speak for PlayStation 2 games (I also worked on PS3 and XBox 360 but didn't handle that part). Sony's Technical Requirements were a pain. We had to build a freaking complicated State machine to handle all save scenarios (PS2 still used those external things to save games, you had to handle the user taking it out midsave, put back, etc). We had a game rejected for having a SINGLE space between PlayStation and that registered trademark symbol.
- ulucs 10y agoI'm never actually sure if I actually saved in the PC port of Valkyria Chronicles. I think we've been trained to wait a while to save since the 8 bit consoles so something feels a bit wrong when things instantly save. Undertale makes amazing use of this, though.
- frik 10y agoThere was a time, when F5 key for Quick-save was common in PC games. Together with Quick-load, it worked very fast, no need for info-screens, it just worked in milli-seconds and allowed gameplay styles completely forgotten or newer experienced by console gamers who are keen to their save-point system.
- PebblesHD 10y agoOne of the best, and most under-utilised features of Half-Life, to name one of many. Made clearing a room an entertaining exercise in how few crowbars/bullets/rockets can you use...
- sametmax 10y agoBaldur's Gate best feature. Allows you to test all variations of the game, every encounter, so much potential, so much possibilty you could just explore, rewind, explore, rewind.
- gpderetta 10y agoaka save scumming
- whywhywhywhy 10y agoquicksave/quickload encourages bad game design. Look at games with save anywhere abilities that include elements of chance like Skyrim and Fallout. So you are able to pickpocket and use charm in these games but because you can save anywhere does anyone ever live with the chance these things fail? Of course not they just try>reload>try>reload>try>succeed. Making that whole skill set pointless and the mechanic pointless
- 8ytecoder 10y agoNo kidding. In one of my previous companies we explicitly added a delay in our financial webapp. We saw a significant improvement in bounce rate after that.
- seanp2k2 10y agoHahaha, I remember coding some physics problem solvers in Visual Basic back in high school, and I added a "calculating" progress bar and messed with the timing a lot to make it still pleasant to use but seem like it was really crunching through your problem. "Crunching" is even funny and a throwback to the days of spinning rust + lots of random seeks.
- pvg 10y agoThat's highly unlikely. Archive Utility is just slow.
- eric_h 10y agoI think you're probably right. I'd imagine that most of the code in Archive Utility.app is very old, and there's very little business reason to spend any engineering time on improving it beyond doing just enough work to make sure it works with API changes for later OS releases. There are third party GUI compression utilities that are faster that you'd find if you actually care about how long it takes to decompress your archives, and the CLI utilities are all there out of the box for people who don't need a GUI.
- ben0x539 10y agoIf it's really old, shouldn't it be faster as it would've been designed to perform adequately on way slower CPUs? ;)
- mwfunk 10y agoWhat is highly unlikely about that? That seems more plausible than, zlib is magically 1000x slower when used by Archive Utility.
- flashman 10y agoWhat seems more likely to me is that the "decompressing a large number of small archives" task is so rare that Apple hasn't optimised it. More likely than "Apple added an arbitrary delay to make the interface more satisfying."
- radley 10y agoNo, it's about showing it long enough so you know what the dialog is and what it's doing. If a dialog popped up for the brief amount of time it actually takes to unzip, it might freak out users: "huh? WTF was that??"
- arnarbi 10y agoThen just don't show a dialog.
- leereeves 10y agoThen users wonder "Did it actually save?"
- jessaustin 10y agoSo just pop a click-anywhere "Saved!" notification.
- egeozcan 10y agoThen users will keep clicking on save until that notification comes, when your save takes just a bit longer than usual.
- jessaustin 10y agoBy hypothesis (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13135385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13135385), the operation is effectively instant. If it weren't, a UI on its own thread could notice that and act accordingly.
- arnarbi 10y agoWe were talking about unzipping. If successful, the unzipped contents appear next to the archive.
- yoz-y 10y ago
- aplummer 10y agoI have been made to do this, I called the function wasteMyTime() and all it did was waste the user's time for a few seconds with a spinner. Still a little bitter about it.
- homero 10y agoYes I've added delays in many web apps, even loader gifs to show fake hard work
- hawkice 10y agoI've been asked to blank out a screen in a single page web application and re-render after 250ms when people switch 'folders'. My boss thought it was a familiar user interface pattern to draw attention to the page content. This is... not the silliest thing I have done professionally.
- hogrammer 10y agoSo it has to better because it's a Mac and Steve wanted it that way!
- noblethrasher 10y agoDon Norman talks about that example of intentional delays in some tax software here: https://vimeo.com/96714148 https://vimeo.com/96714148 (approx 52:30). It sounds like he and his team came up with the idea in that instance.
- interpol_p 10y agoI don't think that's the reason. It's more of an edge case due to some minimum animation timing. If you were expanding 24x 100MB, or 1GB files, the overhead of animation would be much smaller relative to the total time. And it would be quite an informative GUI showing the progress of each file. While the command line version may sit there for a long time before returning to prompt.
- coldpie 10y agoMercifully, in those tax applications you can often just click the "Next Step" button to skip the useless "loading bars". I laughed out loud when I discovered this.