Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)

Post by bitwize » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 12:17 AM UTC

diplomatpuppy wrote: post #11

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.

Post by jwilk » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 12:19 AM UTC

labster wrote: post #25

wanderingstan wrote: post #6

A physical analog of this would be when an Houston airport reduced complaints by moving it's baggage claim to be farther away from gates. Would you call this deception? Also: A friend runs a service that analyzes web page design based on tens of thousands of hours of human eye tracking studies. An analysis only takes a matter of milliseconds, but they found that their conversion rate went up if they artificially put…

Does anyone have more information on the Houston airport case? Because I can imagine how moving the baggage claim further from the gates could result in actual efficiency improvements if it's closer to the exit.

Post by bitwize » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 12:26 AM UTC

so33 wrote: post #13

The NYT example is interesting. 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 r…

Post by bitwize » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 12:31 AM UTC

deecewan wrote: post #51

hinkley wrote: post #10

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?

Our software product eventually got auto-save after having required manually saving for a while. We got rid of the save button, and got tons of complaints. The button went back up, with no functionality, because users liked that. Finally got rid of the button and put some text that said 'saving...' -> 'auto-saved' in its place.

Post by JustSomeNobody » Sat, Feb 03, 2018, 12:43 AM UTC

diplomatpuppy wrote: post #11

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.