5 ms·

It's not a new thing. A famous tax preparation software introduced a "compute" screen that took a few seconds to make people more comfortable with the results e

It's not a new thing. A famous tax preparation software introduced a "compute" screen that took a few seconds to make people more comfortable with the results even if the computation itself is instantaneous.

cletus 8y ago
This is a pretty common pattern. Lots of websites also have "establishing secure connection" interstitials for the same reason.
- mrep 8y ago
  Yep, and the 10 second "deal" compilations for travel packages really happen in a fraction of a second. They just purposefully delay the results to make it seem like they are doing a lot of processing in finding all the possible deals and showing you the best ones.
- Moto7451 8y ago
  Yup. We have a similar thing at my company. Every time we try to test out of the loading animation, conversion and retention goes down. It’s an amazing thing to see.
  - gowld 8y ago
    That's the opposite of what parent and other commenters are saying. Users prefer the loading animations, according to the growth hackers.
    - freehunter 8y ago
      I think they were agreeing. "Test out of" seems to be another way of saying "we tried getting rid of the spinners but people didn't like it"?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- jdietrich 8y ago
  It can be a more friendly way of rate-limiting expensive DB queries. An interstitial that says "too many queries, try again in 10 seconds" is far more annoying than a loading bar.
gowld 8y ago
That famous tax preparation software added several screens to "review" the data.
jdietrich 8y ago
It's really just an audio version of a loading bar or spinner - users get really uncomfortable if the UI becomes unresponsive for even a few hundred milliseconds, but they'll wait for several seconds if it looks like something is happening. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise
- gowld 8y ago
  People have learned that the spinner is non-progress, though. The progress bar still has some life in it, except that those are often fake, not measuring progress.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    OS-level cursor spinners like the mac pinwheel have lost credibility, because they don't reliably indicate whether the system is temporarily unresponsive or needs to be restarted. Modern multitasking OSes have a wide range of situations in which they can become mostly unresponsive without actually crashing. Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. They're still very useful as a comfort indicator for short delays. Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress; in most cases, this could be greatly improved with a bit of educated guesswork. A completely fictitious progress bar can be extremely credible, because it's totally predictable - if you need to create a 10 second delay, then it's easy to make the bar progress linearly from 0% to 100% in that time. Users learn very quickly that your progress bar tells the truth about how long they'll be waiting, even though it's lying about the reason for the wait.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress I disagree with this; I find the progress bars more credible with erratic timing. (And ideally, a display of the task currently at hand, like "Copying tiny file. Copying tiny file. Copying giant file............") A progress bar that smoothly fills from 0 to 100 looks like an animation that somebody thought it would make you happy to watch. A progress bar that lags at 7% and then rushes the rest of the way looks like the software has some internal metric for task completion, and is reporting according to that metric. This implies that when the number changes, progress has happened, which isn't the case for a progress bar that isn't affected by workload. The software can't use "how much time has elapsed?" as a progress metric, because it doesn't know how much time things will take, and because the passage of time does not actually cause -- or reflect -- any progress. That progress bar would be a spinner, not a progress bar.
airstrike 8y ago
I've heard the HP12c calculator also slows down its screen refresh on purpose because people couldn't believe the math was right when it first came out and it was blazing fast.
piyush_soni 8y ago
Most of the flight search companies do the same ("Finding the best/cheapest flights for you"). It's almost instantaneous, but they introduce this artificial wait.
- spuz 8y ago
  That seems unlikey. Flight search really does take a long time because they need to make API calls to external services for most customer requests and they need to refresh prices roughly hourly and so cannot rely on cached data. Also, even the best flight search websites are frustratingly slow. If that delay was created intentionally then they already lost me as a customer as a result.
  - piyush_soni 8y ago
    I can't seem to find that post right now, but a person (on Quora/reddit I guess) who worked in the development team of a flight search company told this fact.

cletus 8y ago

This is a pretty common pattern. Lots of websites also have "establishing secure connection" interstitials for the same reason.

mrep 8y ago
Yep, and the 10 second "deal" compilations for travel packages really happen in a fraction of a second. They just purposefully delay the results to make it seem like they are doing a lot of processing in finding all the possible deals and showing you the best ones.
Moto7451 8y ago
Yup. We have a similar thing at my company. Every time we try to test out of the loading animation, conversion and retention goes down. It’s an amazing thing to see.
- gowld 8y ago
  That's the opposite of what parent and other commenters are saying. Users prefer the loading animations, according to the growth hackers.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    I think they were agreeing. "Test out of" seems to be another way of saying "we tried getting rid of the spinners but people didn't like it"?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
jdietrich 8y ago
It can be a more friendly way of rate-limiting expensive DB queries. An interstitial that says "too many queries, try again in 10 seconds" is far more annoying than a loading bar.

gowld 8y ago

That famous tax preparation software added several screens to "review" the data.

jdietrich 8y ago

It's really just an audio version of a loading bar or spinner - users get really uncomfortable if the UI becomes unresponsive for even a few hundred milliseconds, but they'll wait for several seconds if it looks like something is happening. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise

gowld 8y ago
People have learned that the spinner is non-progress, though. The progress bar still has some life in it, except that those are often fake, not measuring progress.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  OS-level cursor spinners like the mac pinwheel have lost credibility, because they don't reliably indicate whether the system is temporarily unresponsive or needs to be restarted. Modern multitasking OSes have a wide range of situations in which they can become mostly unresponsive without actually crashing. Spinners on the application or UI element level are more credible, but generally worse than a progress bar. They're still very useful as a comfort indicator for short delays. Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress; in most cases, this could be greatly improved with a bit of educated guesswork. A completely fictitious progress bar can be extremely credible, because it's totally predictable - if you need to create a 10 second delay, then it's easy to make the bar progress linearly from 0% to 100% in that time. Users learn very quickly that your progress bar tells the truth about how long they'll be waiting, even though it's lying about the reason for the wait.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > Progress bars have very low credibility on Windows, because users have learned that they're basically useless as an indicator of wait time. A progress bar might get stuck at 7%, then suddenly rush to 100%; conversely, it might get stuck at 95% but never finish. The bar offers no real indication of the actual level of progress I disagree with this; I find the progress bars more credible with erratic timing. (And ideally, a display of the task currently at hand, like "Copying tiny file. Copying tiny file. Copying giant file............") A progress bar that smoothly fills from 0 to 100 looks like an animation that somebody thought it would make you happy to watch. A progress bar that lags at 7% and then rushes the rest of the way looks like the software has some internal metric for task completion, and is reporting according to that metric. This implies that when the number changes, progress has happened, which isn't the case for a progress bar that isn't affected by workload. The software can't use "how much time has elapsed?" as a progress metric, because it doesn't know how much time things will take, and because the passage of time does not actually cause -- or reflect -- any progress. That progress bar would be a spinner, not a progress bar.

airstrike 8y ago

I've heard the HP12c calculator also slows down its screen refresh on purpose because people couldn't believe the math was right when it first came out and it was blazing fast.

piyush_soni 8y ago

Most of the flight search companies do the same ("Finding the best/cheapest flights for you"). It's almost instantaneous, but they introduce this artificial wait.

spuz 8y ago
That seems unlikey. Flight search really does take a long time because they need to make API calls to external services for most customer requests and they need to refresh prices roughly hourly and so cannot rely on cached data. Also, even the best flight search websites are frustratingly slow. If that delay was created intentionally then they already lost me as a customer as a result.
- piyush_soni 8y ago
  I can't seem to find that post right now, but a person (on Quora/reddit I guess) who worked in the development team of a flight search company told this fact.