8 ms·

“This Browser Is Lightning Fast”: Effects of Messaging on Perceived Performance [pdf]

112 points by cpeterso 6y ago

toomim 6y ago
Great! More Academic articles about how to lie to users and convince them that your software is better than the competition without actually making it better. Dark Patterns are the new Light Patterns!
- toomim 6y ago
  Here's another academic article about how to lie to your users from just 8 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26345283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26345283 Truth is so 1995. Nobody cares about honesty anymore!
  - switch007 6y ago
    I wonder if we're happier when we're lied to. Reality kind of sucks
    - modzu 6y ago
      brave new world
      - gumby 6y ago
        Same old world
- _Microft 6y ago
  Thought experiment: two programs take exactly the same time to complete a task but one of them is perceived as slow and the other as fast (for whatever reason). Shouldn't this make the latter the better one of the two programs? At least I would count "being less annoying than the other program" (assuming that perceived slowness is annoying) as a positive feature.
  - toomanyducks 6y ago
    If the only basis for perception of speed is essentially deceit, ``being less annoying'' means it lies to you more --- I don't think I'd call that an intrinsically positive feature.
    - _Microft 6y ago
      Why should the perception of speed have to be based on deceit? I bet I would perceive a progress bar that progresses with constant speed as faster than one that stalls and stutters even when both of them take the same time to completion. Even more if the alternative would be an indefinite progress indicator (hourglass pointer, spinner) that just goes away when the task finishes. On the other hand if the result is that a user is less annoyed by a process, I do not see why it should be wrong to convey that feeling artificially by setting up a situation in which the same result makes them feel better than in a more "honest" one (as you might call it?).
      - matthewrobertso 6y ago
        I definitely agree that showing a progress bar makes a slow operation feel faster, I've seen this work many times. I think I disagree about the constant speed vs stuttering progress bar example though - Progress bars which progress smoothly are great if they are accurate. But because sometimes a UI will show a fake progress bar smoothly filling that will empty after filling and fill again, I've been trained to become skeptical of them. I don't think I've ever seen a stuttery progress bar that was "fake" in that way.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Showing a constant speed progress bar to hide stutter is effectively applying a low-pass filter. Since stutter carries information (that may not be of interest to all your users, but perhaps some), you're low-pass filtering that information. It is a deceit - you're purposefully concealing information, and you're doing it for some reason. How bad is that? It depends on how much a given piece of information is useful to the recipient. Smoothing out something where its high-frequency data matters to the user isn't nice (and can be paternalizing at times). Imagine your car speedometer didn't display instantaneous speed, but a running average over a one-minute window. Would you feel comfortable about it? Or if your bank account displayed your balance as a running average over a week-long window? Progress bars being accurate isn't that important for most, but it may be for some. In a same way you can get a feel for your car by listening to the sounds it makes, you can get a feel for the state of your computing environment by observing a progress bar. For example: does it seem to slow down hard whenever the "storage" light on your laptop is blinking fast (in the old days - when your HDD makes noise)? It may imply you have an issue with your storage. Smooth a progress bar out, and you're removing such environmental cues.
- RedShift1 6y ago
  I agree, instead of making it look faster, make it actually faster. Websites these days are filled with unnecessary crap that just slows things down, start by eliminating those things ffs.
hu3 6y ago
Abstract With technical performance being similar for various web browsers, improving user perceived performance is integral to optimizing browser quality. We investigated the importance of priming, which has a well-documented ability to affect people’s beliefs, on users’ perceptions of web browser performance. We studied 1495 participants who read either an article about performance improvements to Mozilla Firefox, an article about user interface updates to Firefox, or an article about self-driving cars, and then watched video clips of browser tasks. As the priming effect would suggest, we found that reading articles about Firefox increased participants’ perceived performance of Firefox over the most widely used web browser, Google Chrome. In addition, we found that article content mattered, as the article about performance improvements led to higher performance ratings than the article about UI updates. Our findings demonstrate how perceived performance can be improved without making technical improvements and that designers and developers must consider a wider picture when trying to improve user attitudes about technology.
jedberg 6y ago
I think the priming effect is more subtle though. What people express out loud might be primed, but their actual feelings may not change. I wish we had kept the data on this, but our search experiment at reddit is a good counterpoint: At one point we measured how search was doing, so we added a button to the top of the search results that said "did you find what you're looking for?". 70% clicked yes. Not great, not awful. Then we upgraded the search engine, but didn't tell anyone. Suddenly that stat jumped to 90%+. But people would still complain just as much about how bad search is. Many months later, we finally announced that we had changed the search engine. The stats on the button didn't change, but the public narrative did. So what people say they perceive and how they actually feel may not necessarily match.
- bombcar 6y ago
  People remember two things - when things don't work, and when they start working. The first is why people will complain something is "crappy" if they had one bad experience with it, and the second is why the "new" thing is often perceived as better EVEN if it has more problems than the old - as long as it doesn't have the same problems. After awhile the "new" wears off and it's crappy again.
- Stupulous 6y ago
  I am guessing that most people wouldn't use reddit search because of its reputation, so the 90% of people saying they found what they were looking for were a small % of users. When you posted that you updated search, a lot of people who had given up on it might have tested it out again and changed their opinions. Does that check out with your data?
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Sadly I don't remember nor have the data. But that is certainly possible and could have skewed the data.
- dale_glass 6y ago
  Such things are very tricky, because negative experiences are remembered vividly. Search working is expected, search not working is a huge problem. Also, search is a hard thing to get right. When it goes wrong on reddit, it goes annoyingly wrong. For instance, my main issue is that some searches return a flood of irrelevant content. Searching for some games brings a flood from r/GameSwap or some such place. Or, trying to search about Nikola Corporation will bring up a whole lot of sports personalities. That makes sense in that it's a tough problem to solve, but what's annoying is that it has to be dealt by hand every time. I can write a filter, but what I'd really like is a permanent setting: "I'm not ever interested in results from /r/GameSwap or /r/SportsSubreddit". Also it might be helpful to be able to set a limit how much stuff can come from a single subreddit, because some contain very repetitive content that drowns out all useful results. Edit: Also, search should parse youtube URLs and ignore HTTP vs HTTPS, youtube.com vs youtu.be and the ?feature=share junk at the end. I can't be the only one who thinks "This must have been discussed on Reddit, and the discussion has to be more useful over there", but Reddit comparing the URLs literally makes it annoying to find matches.
fullstckuxdev 6y ago
There is no date in the paper...
- topaz0 6y ago
  March 10, 2021 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06181 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06181
smoldesu 6y ago
I'm prepared to catch a lot of shit for this, but I get the feeling this is where we're at with the M1. Yes, the M1 Macbook Air is faster than Intel Macs, but that's not a high bar of entry. People were reasonably frustrated with how Apple gimped Intel's CPUs to run in ultra-thin machines, so why take that anger out on Intel? Intel is far from being the best company on the block (or even the CPU space), but it's pretty concerning to watch how fast people jump to conclusions based on the messaging they get from YouTube and Twitter. I've argued about this with several Apple users, and it always boils down to the same closing argument: "but I want to use a Mac!" There's nothing wrong with that, but it's certainly a certainly a better place to start than "This x is so fast!"
- neogodless 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you're getting at. I might agree that the M1 Air being faster than the previous Macbook Air is one reason why users perceive it as faster, though that doesn't really explain it seeming "much faster." You'd also have to argue that Big Sur makes up for some of the difference, and assume comparisons aren't being made between updated Intel Macbook Airs. I haven't had an opportunity to use an M1-based device, so I really just have to accept that it's surprisingly fast. Of course, just like some "want to use a Mac", I "want to use a gaming PC/laptop" and so I do. And my gaming PC and laptop are both "very fast." I don't know that their speed would surprise people coming from older, Intel-based PCs or laptops, though depending on what they are doing, they might. But I still don't know what point you're trying to make. I guess you're just saying people read that the M1 machines are fast, and so they think they are. But there also benchmarks that show it performs remarkably well, on par with low-wattage Ryzen laptop CPUs and in some benchmarks / single-core with high-wattage Ryzen desktop CPUs, which are really fast.
- wonnage 6y ago
  Try actually using one? The 2015-2017 12" Macbook was an ultra-thin fanless machine that was delightfully portable but was basically unusable for anything more than basic web browsing. It'd burn my thighs just watching Youtube. The 2021 M1 Air is a slightly chunkier fanless machine that runs circles around Intel laptops with desktop-class processors, at lower cost and up to triple/quadruple the battery life. It's unlike any Intel laptop you'll find on the market today. Apple deserves plenty of flak for their laptop design decisions (crappy webcam, fat screen bezels, port selection...) but the M1 is probably the biggest improvement to laptop performance in a decade.
godelmachine 6y ago
Coming straight to it - in my perception, performance-wise ranking would be → 1. Microsoft Edge 2. Google Chrome 3. Mozilla Firefox Although Firefox is a RAM guzzler and can get excruciatingly slow, I made Firefox my primary browser after I got fed up of Google AMP, was surprised to so many useful features in Firefox, such as sending tabs across Mobile ↔ Desktop. Edge has done a pretty decent job, thought I have some issues with their freezing tabs and recently introduced vertical tabs.
- toast0 6y ago
  I haven't tried the new Edge, but the old Edge used to get into states where button presses on the controls would be queued. That's not great for performance perception. (Incidentally, firefox on Android sometimes gets there too, especially after viewing npr org, hmm)
  - godelmachine 6y ago
    Edge Legacy would be deprecated this year, along with IE, AFAIK.
- astrange 6y ago
  Firefox has some of the best memory tools and your problems could always be extensions. (Or if not, getting a content blocker extension might help.) Check about:memory.
- progval 6y ago
  Did you read an article about Edge's performance recently?
  - godelmachine 6y ago
    Which one? Please post the link here.
- fifilura 6y ago
  I have always thought that the fastest browser is the one I don't use daily. That the fact that my daily browser has 50-100 tabs open makes the browser I switch to seem much faster. Unless of course the first thing that happens when i switch is that the seldom used browser asks me to restart it to install an new version.
cblconfederate 6y ago
You can fool some people some times, but people use the browser every day, if it s not fast they ll use another. And afaik firefox isn't planning an IPO or being acquired by google so i dont see why they would want to use these cheap tricks
- hu3 6y ago
  Mozilla's main income comes from Google being default search engine on Firefox. I think it's about half a billion dollars per year. It's in their absolute best interest to market Firefox as much as possible.
  - gsich 6y ago
    >It's in their absolute best interest to market Firefox as much as possible. Google? No. Financing Mozilla is merely a move to defer monopolistic claims. Google doesn't care about Mozilla.
    - hu3 6y ago
      Obviously I meant it's in Mozilla's interest to market Firefox.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    Yeah they care about retaining users, not showing "promising growth", which is what they'd achieve with such tricks
marcodiego 6y ago
A classic: mojave experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsStHxtVr_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsStHxtVr_w
- 015a 6y ago
  "Well, I have to confess to you; this is all staged; everyone on camera is reading a script; none of this is real."

112 points by cpeterso 6y ago

Great! More Academic articles about how to lie to users and convince them that your software is better than the competition without actually making it better. Dark Patterns are the new Light Patterns!

toomim 6y ago
Here's another academic article about how to lie to your users from just 8 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26345283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26345283 Truth is so 1995. Nobody cares about honesty anymore!
- switch007 6y ago
  I wonder if we're happier when we're lied to. Reality kind of sucks
  - modzu 6y ago
    brave new world
    - gumby 6y ago
      Same old world
_Microft 6y ago
Thought experiment: two programs take exactly the same time to complete a task but one of them is perceived as slow and the other as fast (for whatever reason). Shouldn't this make the latter the better one of the two programs? At least I would count "being less annoying than the other program" (assuming that perceived slowness is annoying) as a positive feature.
- toomanyducks 6y ago
  If the only basis for perception of speed is essentially deceit, ``being less annoying'' means it lies to you more --- I don't think I'd call that an intrinsically positive feature.
  - _Microft 6y ago
    Why should the perception of speed have to be based on deceit? I bet I would perceive a progress bar that progresses with constant speed as faster than one that stalls and stutters even when both of them take the same time to completion. Even more if the alternative would be an indefinite progress indicator (hourglass pointer, spinner) that just goes away when the task finishes. On the other hand if the result is that a user is less annoyed by a process, I do not see why it should be wrong to convey that feeling artificially by setting up a situation in which the same result makes them feel better than in a more "honest" one (as you might call it?).
    - matthewrobertso 6y ago
      I definitely agree that showing a progress bar makes a slow operation feel faster, I've seen this work many times. I think I disagree about the constant speed vs stuttering progress bar example though - Progress bars which progress smoothly are great if they are accurate. But because sometimes a UI will show a fake progress bar smoothly filling that will empty after filling and fill again, I've been trained to become skeptical of them. I don't think I've ever seen a stuttery progress bar that was "fake" in that way.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Showing a constant speed progress bar to hide stutter is effectively applying a low-pass filter. Since stutter carries information (that may not be of interest to all your users, but perhaps some), you're low-pass filtering that information. It is a deceit - you're purposefully concealing information, and you're doing it for some reason. How bad is that? It depends on how much a given piece of information is useful to the recipient. Smoothing out something where its high-frequency data matters to the user isn't nice (and can be paternalizing at times). Imagine your car speedometer didn't display instantaneous speed, but a running average over a one-minute window. Would you feel comfortable about it? Or if your bank account displayed your balance as a running average over a week-long window? Progress bars being accurate isn't that important for most, but it may be for some. In a same way you can get a feel for your car by listening to the sounds it makes, you can get a feel for the state of your computing environment by observing a progress bar. For example: does it seem to slow down hard whenever the "storage" light on your laptop is blinking fast (in the old days - when your HDD makes noise)? It may imply you have an issue with your storage. Smooth a progress bar out, and you're removing such environmental cues.
RedShift1 6y ago
I agree, instead of making it look faster, make it actually faster. Websites these days are filled with unnecessary crap that just slows things down, start by eliminating those things ffs.

hu3 6y ago

Abstract With technical performance being similar for various web browsers, improving user perceived performance is integral to optimizing browser quality. We investigated the importance of priming, which has a well-documented ability to affect people’s beliefs, on users’ perceptions of web browser performance. We studied 1495 participants who read either an article about performance improvements to Mozilla Firefox, an article about user interface updates to Firefox, or an article about self-driving cars, and then watched video clips of browser tasks. As the priming effect would suggest, we found that reading articles about Firefox increased participants’ perceived performance of Firefox over the most widely used web browser, Google Chrome. In addition, we found that article content mattered, as the article about performance improvements led to higher performance ratings than the article about UI updates. Our findings demonstrate how perceived performance can be improved without making technical improvements and that designers and developers must consider a wider picture when trying to improve user attitudes about technology.

jedberg 6y ago

I think the priming effect is more subtle though. What people express out loud might be primed, but their actual feelings may not change. I wish we had kept the data on this, but our search experiment at reddit is a good counterpoint: At one point we measured how search was doing, so we added a button to the top of the search results that said "did you find what you're looking for?". 70% clicked yes. Not great, not awful. Then we upgraded the search engine, but didn't tell anyone. Suddenly that stat jumped to 90%+. But people would still complain just as much about how bad search is. Many months later, we finally announced that we had changed the search engine. The stats on the button didn't change, but the public narrative did. So what people say they perceive and how they actually feel may not necessarily match.

bombcar 6y ago
People remember two things - when things don't work, and when they start working. The first is why people will complain something is "crappy" if they had one bad experience with it, and the second is why the "new" thing is often perceived as better EVEN if it has more problems than the old - as long as it doesn't have the same problems. After awhile the "new" wears off and it's crappy again.
Stupulous 6y ago
I am guessing that most people wouldn't use reddit search because of its reputation, so the 90% of people saying they found what they were looking for were a small % of users. When you posted that you updated search, a lot of people who had given up on it might have tested it out again and changed their opinions. Does that check out with your data?
- jedberg 6y ago
  Sadly I don't remember nor have the data. But that is certainly possible and could have skewed the data.
dale_glass 6y ago
Such things are very tricky, because negative experiences are remembered vividly. Search working is expected, search not working is a huge problem. Also, search is a hard thing to get right. When it goes wrong on reddit, it goes annoyingly wrong. For instance, my main issue is that some searches return a flood of irrelevant content. Searching for some games brings a flood from r/GameSwap or some such place. Or, trying to search about Nikola Corporation will bring up a whole lot of sports personalities. That makes sense in that it's a tough problem to solve, but what's annoying is that it has to be dealt by hand every time. I can write a filter, but what I'd really like is a permanent setting: "I'm not ever interested in results from /r/GameSwap or /r/SportsSubreddit". Also it might be helpful to be able to set a limit how much stuff can come from a single subreddit, because some contain very repetitive content that drowns out all useful results. Edit: Also, search should parse youtube URLs and ignore HTTP vs HTTPS, youtube.com vs youtu.be and the ?feature=share junk at the end. I can't be the only one who thinks "This must have been discussed on Reddit, and the discussion has to be more useful over there", but Reddit comparing the URLs literally makes it annoying to find matches.

fullstckuxdev 6y ago

There is no date in the paper...

topaz0 6y ago
March 10, 2021 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06181 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06181

smoldesu 6y ago

I'm prepared to catch a lot of shit for this, but I get the feeling this is where we're at with the M1. Yes, the M1 Macbook Air is faster than Intel Macs, but that's not a high bar of entry. People were reasonably frustrated with how Apple gimped Intel's CPUs to run in ultra-thin machines, so why take that anger out on Intel? Intel is far from being the best company on the block (or even the CPU space), but it's pretty concerning to watch how fast people jump to conclusions based on the messaging they get from YouTube and Twitter. I've argued about this with several Apple users, and it always boils down to the same closing argument: "but I want to use a Mac!" There's nothing wrong with that, but it's certainly a certainly a better place to start than "This x is so fast!"

neogodless 6y ago
I'm not sure what you're getting at. I might agree that the M1 Air being faster than the previous Macbook Air is one reason why users perceive it as faster, though that doesn't really explain it seeming "much faster." You'd also have to argue that Big Sur makes up for some of the difference, and assume comparisons aren't being made between updated Intel Macbook Airs. I haven't had an opportunity to use an M1-based device, so I really just have to accept that it's surprisingly fast. Of course, just like some "want to use a Mac", I "want to use a gaming PC/laptop" and so I do. And my gaming PC and laptop are both "very fast." I don't know that their speed would surprise people coming from older, Intel-based PCs or laptops, though depending on what they are doing, they might. But I still don't know what point you're trying to make. I guess you're just saying people read that the M1 machines are fast, and so they think they are. But there also benchmarks that show it performs remarkably well, on par with low-wattage Ryzen laptop CPUs and in some benchmarks / single-core with high-wattage Ryzen desktop CPUs, which are really fast.
wonnage 6y ago
Try actually using one? The 2015-2017 12" Macbook was an ultra-thin fanless machine that was delightfully portable but was basically unusable for anything more than basic web browsing. It'd burn my thighs just watching Youtube. The 2021 M1 Air is a slightly chunkier fanless machine that runs circles around Intel laptops with desktop-class processors, at lower cost and up to triple/quadruple the battery life. It's unlike any Intel laptop you'll find on the market today. Apple deserves plenty of flak for their laptop design decisions (crappy webcam, fat screen bezels, port selection...) but the M1 is probably the biggest improvement to laptop performance in a decade.

godelmachine 6y ago

Coming straight to it - in my perception, performance-wise ranking would be → 1. Microsoft Edge 2. Google Chrome 3. Mozilla Firefox Although Firefox is a RAM guzzler and can get excruciatingly slow, I made Firefox my primary browser after I got fed up of Google AMP, was surprised to so many useful features in Firefox, such as sending tabs across Mobile ↔ Desktop. Edge has done a pretty decent job, thought I have some issues with their freezing tabs and recently introduced vertical tabs.

toast0 6y ago
I haven't tried the new Edge, but the old Edge used to get into states where button presses on the controls would be queued. That's not great for performance perception. (Incidentally, firefox on Android sometimes gets there too, especially after viewing npr org, hmm)
- godelmachine 6y ago
  Edge Legacy would be deprecated this year, along with IE, AFAIK.
astrange 6y ago
Firefox has some of the best memory tools and your problems could always be extensions. (Or if not, getting a content blocker extension might help.) Check about:memory.
progval 6y ago
Did you read an article about Edge's performance recently?
- godelmachine 6y ago
  Which one? Please post the link here.
fifilura 6y ago
I have always thought that the fastest browser is the one I don't use daily. That the fact that my daily browser has 50-100 tabs open makes the browser I switch to seem much faster. Unless of course the first thing that happens when i switch is that the seldom used browser asks me to restart it to install an new version.

cblconfederate 6y ago

You can fool some people some times, but people use the browser every day, if it s not fast they ll use another. And afaik firefox isn't planning an IPO or being acquired by google so i dont see why they would want to use these cheap tricks

hu3 6y ago
Mozilla's main income comes from Google being default search engine on Firefox. I think it's about half a billion dollars per year. It's in their absolute best interest to market Firefox as much as possible.
- gsich 6y ago
  >It's in their absolute best interest to market Firefox as much as possible. Google? No. Financing Mozilla is merely a move to defer monopolistic claims. Google doesn't care about Mozilla.
  - hu3 6y ago
    Obviously I meant it's in Mozilla's interest to market Firefox.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Yeah they care about retaining users, not showing "promising growth", which is what they'd achieve with such tricks

marcodiego 6y ago

A classic: mojave experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsStHxtVr_w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsStHxtVr_w

015a 6y ago
"Well, I have to confess to you; this is all staged; everyone on camera is reading a script; none of this is real."