4 ms·

100%. Loading indicators are psychological placebos for the user.

QuercusMax 5y ago
Reminds me of a story my old boss used to tell about how they dealt with complaints about long waits for elevators in one high-rise building: putting mirrors on the walls. With sufficient distraction (everyone likes looking at themself, or at least can't help it) the elevators were no longer "too slow"!
- jrootabega 5y ago
  Once one gets old enough, you'll just get up and pee whenever something is slow on the computer.
  - apricot 5y ago
    I've been known to get up and code whenever something was too slow on the toilet.
  - jeffwask 5y ago
    I sort of miss the 5 minute compile time coffee breaks.
  - QuercusMax 5y ago
    Or you can just drink too much coffee and la croix and have to pee all the time. :)
- jeffwask 5y ago
  I read once how they kept elevator attendants long after they had any use as a placebo to help people get acclimated to automatic elevators.
bwlg 5y ago
Maybe on the web. But I feel on the web they are often not even there to mask load times but are just used as powerpoint-transition-like-effect. And also to prevent the user from seeing page-jumps when the page first loads. But as an anecdote of where a progress bar was more than just cosmetic: Couple of years ago I attempted to upgrade to a new MacOS on my Macbook and the install ran into some error but gave no indication whatsoever. So the only info I had was that the progress bar hadn't moved at all in 5 hours. I waited another couple of hours before I switched it off and tried again. Without the progress bar I probably would've waited another day. I mean my macbook was still bricked but at least I could compare it to screenshots online of people getting stuck at the same point, allowing us all to blame Apple :) That's quite a specific scenario but anytime it's difficult to debug what's actually happening, I wouldn't say progress bars are just cosmetic.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  Off topic, but that's why I hate GUIs and animations hiding log output of the system when it's doing something important. With a text console you can see exactly what was going on and in case of where it hung.

Reminds me of a story my old boss used to tell about how they dealt with complaints about long waits for elevators in one high-rise building: putting mirrors on the walls. With sufficient distraction (everyone likes looking at themself, or at least can't help it) the elevators were no longer "too slow"!

jrootabega 5y ago
Once one gets old enough, you'll just get up and pee whenever something is slow on the computer.
- apricot 5y ago
  I've been known to get up and code whenever something was too slow on the toilet.
- jeffwask 5y ago
  I sort of miss the 5 minute compile time coffee breaks.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  Or you can just drink too much coffee and la croix and have to pee all the time. :)
jeffwask 5y ago
I read once how they kept elevator attendants long after they had any use as a placebo to help people get acclimated to automatic elevators.

bwlg 5y ago

Maybe on the web. But I feel on the web they are often not even there to mask load times but are just used as powerpoint-transition-like-effect. And also to prevent the user from seeing page-jumps when the page first loads. But as an anecdote of where a progress bar was more than just cosmetic: Couple of years ago I attempted to upgrade to a new MacOS on my Macbook and the install ran into some error but gave no indication whatsoever. So the only info I had was that the progress bar hadn't moved at all in 5 hours. I waited another couple of hours before I switched it off and tried again. Without the progress bar I probably would've waited another day. I mean my macbook was still bricked but at least I could compare it to screenshots online of people getting stuck at the same point, allowing us all to blame Apple :) That's quite a specific scenario but anytime it's difficult to debug what's actually happening, I wouldn't say progress bars are just cosmetic.

still_grokking 5y ago
Off topic, but that's why I hate GUIs and animations hiding log output of the system when it's doing something important. With a text console you can see exactly what was going on and in case of where it hung.