3 ms·

I think this research shows that you can influence perception of time without resorting to outright "making up" the progress bar. You can imagine using this tec

I think this research shows that you can influence perception of time without resorting to outright "making up" the progress bar. You can imagine using this technique not to lie about progress but just to make short progress bars appear to move faster. I spent several hours in Google Analytics yesterday. It's been a few months since I've used it, and I remember thinking that it seemed a lot faster. They've recently refactored their UI, and possibly done some system improvements, who knows. But after looking at this research, I can see that they've also taken advantage of similar techniques to make their loading bars seem faster. It's a free improvement of 11% in perceived speed, just for changing an animation, without misrepresenting the underlying information.

euyyn 9y ago
I laughed a bit when the video said it made the perceived speed 11% faster. Two significant figures shouldn't be used to measure a perception that is subjective and probably not even linear. Unless they have a scale of "perceived speed to actual speed" for regular progress bars, that they're using to gauge the enhanced ones?
- chickenfries 9y ago
  You made me curious so I dug into the paper. > For our final study, we selected a progress bar that featured Backwards Decelerating ribbing, as this was slightly preferred over the pulsating behavior in study three. This was compared against a standard, solid color progress bar. The test interface, instead of simply recording participant’s preferences, used the responses to warp the duration of the ribbed progress bar (the solid color progress bar had a fixed duration to act as a control). Specifically, if a user felt the ribbed progress bar was faster, its duration was extended (to slow it down). Conversely, if the user felt the ribbing was slower, the duration was reduced (to speed it up). Equal responses left the duration unchanged. The goal was to allow participants to converge to a duration where they believed the two progress bars “felt” equal. (For an extended discussion on method of adjustment experiments,please refer to [3], “Difference Thresholds”). So I want to guess they were given some kind of interface that would let them decrease the speed in increments of 1%, perhaps.

euyyn 9y ago

I laughed a bit when the video said it made the perceived speed 11% faster. Two significant figures shouldn't be used to measure a perception that is subjective and probably not even linear. Unless they have a scale of "perceived speed to actual speed" for regular progress bars, that they're using to gauge the enhanced ones?

chickenfries 9y ago
You made me curious so I dug into the paper. > For our final study, we selected a progress bar that featured Backwards Decelerating ribbing, as this was slightly preferred over the pulsating behavior in study three. This was compared against a standard, solid color progress bar. The test interface, instead of simply recording participant’s preferences, used the responses to warp the duration of the ribbed progress bar (the solid color progress bar had a fixed duration to act as a control). Specifically, if a user felt the ribbed progress bar was faster, its duration was extended (to slow it down). Conversely, if the user felt the ribbing was slower, the duration was reduced (to speed it up). Equal responses left the duration unchanged. The goal was to allow participants to converge to a duration where they believed the two progress bars “felt” equal. (For an extended discussion on method of adjustment experiments,please refer to [3], “Difference Thresholds”). So I want to guess they were given some kind of interface that would let them decrease the speed in increments of 1%, perhaps.