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It’s a well-documented fact of user experience that asking users what they want is often the least accurate way to uncover that information.
Deception is NEVER benevolent. Don't lie to your users, people.
It's visual "proof" that the app itself isn't hung. I agree that you would have to be careful with the text, but progress bars do have some value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's visual "proof" that the app itself isn't hung. I agree that you would have to be careful with the text, but progress bars do have some value.
I disagree. There's a difference between a progress bar that could just be a spinner or no progress bar at all because it's fake. And a progress bar that attempts to communicate real progress.
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.
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…
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…
Makes me wonder if online retailers for luxury/fashion items could increase sales by doing something similar.
Announce the latest fashion item via social media, but make the page take forever to load... maybe throw in a few fake 404s to a percentage of users saying the store's website is overloaded and encourage the user to refresh. Then when the page finally loads there's a limited supply left, and when they put the item in their cart there's a ticking timer because "X" other people are already shopping this item too. Maybe some other last-minute artificial constraints, like people can only check-out with AMEX.
So basically Ticketmaster for luxury goods, except you secretly always have enough in stock.
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.
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.
Couldn't you have give also vague, but accurate information as well? 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.
Could you give me an example of what you consider "vague, but accurate information?"
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.