61–70 of 161 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked with the dev who wrote this at Wells Fargo. To be fair, they do have windows in their office.
I worked with the dev who wrote this at Wells Fargo You can't say that and not provide more details.... You are obligated now.
So we wrote a perl script that printed out a bunch of platitudes like these, while printing out an ASCII "progress bar." It had some randomly determined sleep() calls in there to make it seem like it was doing something.
Optimizing priority queues...
Recalculating scheduler lookup tables...
Terminating unused system processes...
Recovering memory leaks...
Flushing network buffers...
We called it "speed" and deployed it to the app server. Some folks started getting into the habit of running it every morning and swore by it.
This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…
I worked for a company that implemented a similar technique and it had positive results. The main features of one of their web based software products was a report generator. The report was quite complex and included a lot of calculations based hierarchical relationships of entities in the system. To build this report by hand would probably take hours, but the queries and calculations were all highly optimized and co…
One example of this is shown in a usability study by the Baymard Institute on top ecommerce checkout processes [1]. The goal of the study was to determine best practices for checkout usability by testing the top 15 ecommerce sites. One of the more fascinating finds they made was that during the checkout process, users perceived certain fields as being more secure than others. Even though the fields were all part of the same form and on the same page, users still believed fields with a little lock icon were more secure than the rest of the fields! It didn't matter if the entire page was encrypted. Users would abandon the checkout process because the credit card fields didn't "feel secure" compared to the rest of the page.
To most of us, this looks like a frivolous feature suggested by a "UX monkey" (as one commenter put it) but don't underestimate the power of making users feel safe. For all we know, this stupid gif could have cut support calls 20%.
This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…
I was sad when Sims 2 and Sims 3 didn't include this little gem. A cool bit a humor while you're loading the game? awesome.
This reminds me of a story I heard about those ATMs. What I heard is that there are technologies out there that can make a machine to count/validate cash almost instantaneous while not sacrificing accuracy. But apparently, that makes some customers worry that their money is not being processed right, and thus, every time you deposit money to those ATMs, they make that grinding noise, appears to be doing something use…
On the other hand, whatever algorithm they're using for the handwriting recognition on checks is pretty amazing. I've deposited 100's of checks and I've only had to type an amount once.
This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…
Actually, The Sims 1 did this too. Obviously, it's a game and it's fluff so it's more acceptable than the bullshit that WellsFargo is doing here. I was sad when Sims 2 and Sims 3 didn't include this little gem. A cool bit a humor while you're loading the game? awesome. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwFsmQu71BE
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do stories like this make me depressed.
Because (i'm guessing, since you're on HN) that you're an engineer. You spend all day telling the most logical thing ever created how to act. Its as predictable as a childrens television show. Human psychology is irrational, and thus unpredictable. The engineer psyche doesn't like that.
This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…
I worked for a company that implemented a similar technique and it had positive results. The main features of one of their web based software products was a report generator. The report was quite complex and included a lot of calculations based hierarchical relationships of entities in the system. To build this report by hand would probably take hours, but the queries and calculations were all highly optimized and co…