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Comment by sanoli | Hacker News Reader

Not the same thing but similar, a programmer wrote once how he made his software delay the answer to some user action to make it look like the program was hard at work. The process was actually very fast, almost instantaneous, so he added some message like " working - x seconds left ". Maybe it was on HN some years ago...

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I did that with my strategy game Proximity. It takes a fraction of a fraction of a second for it to calculate what move to make next, but if it places it immediately, it feels aggressive and intimidating.

Just imagine if you were playing chess against an opponent and as soon as you made your carefully planned movement the other player immediately made his move and it was your turn again right away. It feels pretty aggressive, doesn't it?

So I gave players the impression of the computer taking time to think by instituting a random delay (within a given range which I tested until it felt right) before it acted, and I think it felt a lot more natural and less aggressive because of that.

If people are curious about the game, it's easy to find and you can play it online.

I suspected that this was the case with Proximity, but the delay still served its purpose for me. I haven't played it in a while, so maybe I'll give it a whirl again. Thanks for putting together such a fun little game!

Thanks! The game is almost 12 years old now, which still feels weird to think about. I did have high ambitions to make it like the next timeless game (like chess), including making it a bit less tactical and more strategic, but my own ego and life got in the way and it kinda withered on the vine from me not keeping it updated, making a proper multiplayer version, not making it cross-platform enough, etc.

I even turned down a request from the Puzzle Pirates guys to include it as a minigame in their game (that was a mistake), and OmgPop almost paid me to make a version for their website (shortly before they made Draw Something and got bought by Zynga), but I was too busy trying to finish my degree at the time.

I've been tempted to start an open source version to get some help developing it, but I started getting more into board game design lately and I've been programming less and less in my spare time. Kinda hoping I get a reputation in the board game world and then get a board game version of Proximity published (it's an abstract, so it's a harder sell to publishers).

Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed the game. Hopefully someday I'll put out a newer version of it.

I did the same thing once for a dialog box on an iPhone app. The check would fail instantly if the phone was offline. It didn't feel "right" and we didn't really have the time to change the UX so I just added a random delay of between 1.0 to 1.5 seconds. Still in production today.

Reticulating splines...

I've also done this in some programs I wrote as a teenager to solve math / physics homework to make it seem like it was doing more than it was.

I used to do the same, I remember adding labels saying "Processing" inside a while and then adding a dot for every loop, just to make it look like a "real" program. Good old times.

I had to do this for a program I wrote for a study - basically it pretended to be a networked game with other users, which meant I created fake "Loading" screens that had a random-ish delay.

Now there's an interesting UX paper if it hasn't been done already. In UX we hear that a milliseconds long delay directly affects user retention rates. I wonder how users feel about search reliability, or data integrity when results are faster than expected.

I don't know about papers, but I've read writeups from companies adding a "delay", usually with a progress bar, for things that are actually near-instant to perform. For "large" seeming operations, sometimes users assume an instant response actually means a failure.

DigitalOcean's Create Droplet flow comes to mind. You get a progress bar indicating your droplet is being created, but in just a few seconds you can click "My Droplets" and go use it immediately.

I stated elsewhere that I introduced a delay for those very reasons. In that case the search functionality was reported as broken for the second search. Because the first and second test searches happened to have the same results in that particular case, but the fast response prevented an understanding that something was in fact done.

> Maybe it was on HN some years ago...

On HN there was this about Well Fargo "Establishing Secure Connection".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5305925

I did this myself just a few weeks ago. The complaints was that search results would often come back fast enough that the user may not understand anything was done if the results happen to be the same.

I wish I could find where I read this, but this used to be an issue with LED brake lights on cars, they would come on so fast that people had longer reaction times because they knew something had changed but couldn't put their finger on it instantly.

Saw a form recently with search-as-you-type that included a fake button that when pressed would write "Search Complete" to the screen, but had no other function, for users who didn't comprehend search as you type.

I would have to link that up to analytics just to see how many people clicked on it.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

It was pretty hilarious.

I got a bug-fix from the form developer that his button wasn't working, and I kept trying to explain to him that it couldn't possibly work, it didn't do anything.

Finally he explained that if the user had clicked the fake button already, and then changed their search to a search that reported the same results, it wasn't pretending to search again, and this was causing a lot of bug reports from his client.

I helped him rewrite the fake button to make a bigger deal about (fake) searching again, and apparently the bug reports went away.

TurboTax's online tax prep software does this. You can just click the Next button as the slider animations slowly fill up. Maybe this comment will save someone else some time this year :)

Having sporadically just done my taxes last night, I've gotta' say, I'm a fan of TurboTax. Probably the best website experience I've ever had. I can't recall anything else that knocks it out of the park on aesthetics, function, latency, UI etc like it does.

There were many such programmers, myself including. I don't even want to check if that software still lives, it was security theater abomination.

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