We've been experimenting with replacing load bars with a short textual description; which got a lot of positive feedback from clients. Then we tried adding a "

We've been experimenting with replacing load bars with a short textual description; which got a lot of positive feedback from clients. Then we tried adding a "count up" timer for each piece of text - i.e. a timer that counts how long you're stuck at each segment. This was an entirely graphical tweak (that shipped with an update to another service) and we immediately got feedback along the lines of "OMG, whatever you just updated it is so so fast now! great stuff".