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Reminds me of the loading screen for The Sims (an obvious parody of the above mentioned tactic) (You might want to mute it. The loading messages are at the bottom) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpMiI2QooKQ
Reticulating splines actually comes from SimCity 2000 and they then used the idea in The Sims later http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines
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 can't always give an accurate response because our scheduling is constantly being derailed by urgent tasks and the not-so-urgent tasks get complete in between.
People just want to know you haven't forgotten about them, throw in some light humour and a "I'll try to get it done before knock off tomorrow " and they tend to let me get back to working.
Or else I will randomly display various loading messages that are quirky but not relevant. Must admit I was highly inspired by the old SimCity loading messages, which seems to have further inspired the devs at Slack etc. with their creative loading messages.
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I remember reading long ago about how they did something similar at an airport(Dallas IIRC). Basically, people complained about baggage claim taking too long, so they just moved the baggage claim area to the other side of the airport, so it took longer for passengers to reach it, by the time they did, their bags would already be there, so the complaints stopped.
I feel like this really isn't deception but actually solving the problem which is that passengers didn't want to stand around.
Reminds me of the old IE bar (not sure if it still does this), but it would crawl towards 100%, getting slower and slower as it approached the end, when waiting for a page to respond. In reality IE had no idea how much "progress" had been made by the server, if any.
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> Couldn't you have give also vague, but accurate information as well? Could you give me an example of what you consider "vague, but accurate information?"
Connecting Fetching data Processing query Preparing for display
As a bonus, this can occasionally be useful for bug squashing. "I've been waiting for hours and it's only up to row 5681" when you know for a fact that there's <2000 rows is a lot more informative than "My report won't finish."
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I feel like this really isn't deception but actually solving the problem which is that passengers didn't want to stand around.
Except they had to spend the same amount of time walking. If presented as a choice I'd usually choose standing.
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No it's not. It doesn't prove anything, and there are ways you can prove it that don't deceive the user, like a status message at the end or a change of button text. The value of a progress bar is for the user to see the state of a background process, not to see whether it suceeded. Don't assume that all your users, or even a small proportion, think this.
I'm not suggesting deceiving users. I'm suggesting a spinner isn't much proof of the app not being hung. Some kind of updating status or progress is, assuming it's not complete bullshit. I can see cases where "slightly bullshit, but somewhat true" is better than just a spinner or unresponsive UI.
This is where we agree. If the progress bar is bullshit (like the IE6 loading bar), then it means just as much to most users as a spinning beach ball, but slightly more insulting to the users' intelligence/experience.
It seems to be an attempt to increase the tension but the execution is incredibly bad.