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I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Cross checking, Sorting" and other such nonsense.
The report now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse the "On Timer" event for it to work.
The users were delighted with the improvement.
Deception is NEVER benevolent. Don't lie to your users, people.
So I should never pretend that an operation that took 10 ms took 200ms so the users stop hammering the Save button over and over again because there's 'no way' it could have saved that quickly?
During the US presidential election I interpreted the needle’s fluctuations (on what was a simulation of an analog gauge–a skeuomorphism) to indicate some form of uncertainty in the data. This would not be deceptive (at least according to my own mental model of how such a gauge would operate in real life).
However, according to this article many interpreted the movement as the needle reflecting actual changes in data. In this interpretation (the gauge reading reflects at all times the actual data) this would be deceptive.
I realized that I haven’t seen one of those gauges in real life for a very long time. Have people in general (or, inversely, the NYT) forgotten how analog gauges are supposed to work?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I should never pretend that an operation that took 10 ms took 200ms so the users stop hammering the Save button over and over again because there's 'no way' it could have saved that quickly?
Why wouldn't you instead show a timestamp of the last save, giving confirmation that the save really went through?
Or disable the button for a second after saved?
Or show a cute little "save complete" icon?
Or autosave on change and disregard the save button entirely?
I had a report in Microsoft Access that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it. I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Cross checking, Sorting" and other such nonsense. The report now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse the "On Timer" event for it to work. The users were delighted with the improvement.
I had a report in Microsoft Access that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it. I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Cross checking, Sorting" and other such nonsense. The report now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse the "On Timer" event for it to work. The users were delighted with the improvement.
User's like to know what's going on, even if they maybe don't understand all the details, but at least they see things are happening and not just a (fake) progress bar. So they can connect more to what is happening and therefore be more understanding and patient instead of just being told to wait, with no further information, which nobody likes.
Deception is NEVER benevolent. Don't lie to your users, people.
This article lumps a lot of techniques together that are fundamentally different. The ones that are actual deception are not benevolent, and the ones that are benevolent are not actually deception. Deception is leading someone to believe something that isn't true. If a deliberate delay is added to a UI to make it clear to the user that actual work is being done, this is not deception. You are leading the user to beli…
How is it not deceptive to make a user wait longer than the task takes? (Perceived benefit aside)
How is it not benevolent to make the progress bar smooth even if the underlying process is not?
Most users don't and shouldn't need to understand a process that may not progress linearly.
The article is pretty clearly operating on a definition of 'deception' where it means showing the user something different than the underlying process.
This article lumps a lot of techniques together that are fundamentally different. The ones that are actual deception are not benevolent, and the ones that are benevolent are not actually deception. Deception is leading someone to believe something that isn't true. If a deliberate delay is added to a UI to make it clear to the user that actual work is being done, this is not deception. You are leading the user to beli…
I would think that fake progress bars about "triple checking" your taxes would fall into that latter categorization.
Though I did find some steps where it made you think it was checking stuff you could actually hit continue and it would work all the same but cut the animation short.
I wonder if they have focus groups and it works for the masses makes them feel happy or acfomplished, but for the long tail it's just frustrating.
Would be nice to disable such animations.