Hacker News Reader

Comment by yegle | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me the progress bar in TurboTax to check whether you have every number correct. Any modern computer should not take more than 1 second to do the verification and the animation is pure fake.

View on HN

Not defending them here, but at a previous job I noticed them doing the same and asked why. Turned out when they updated the site to make the UI/UX faster they got calls to customer service from people saying that didn’t think it worked because “it went too fast”.

Sounds like the Houston airport where people complained about waiting too long at customs during international travel, and the successful response was to simply elongate the walk to customs.

Nothing changed, except the customer perspective.

I've also read that this is the reason baggage claim is so far away from arrivals. It means passengers spend less time standing around the baggage claim area waiting for their bags. The overall wait time is the same, but it's the dead time spent waiting that people hate.

I’ve found baggage claim to be nearest the exit, presumably so that one need not lug their bag the half-mile from the plane. And baggage claim needs to be outside security so it all works nicely.

Baggage claim being far away from arrivals, and baggage claim being near the exit, are orthogonal requirements. Baggage claim could be close to both the exit and arrivals simply by having arrivals be near the exit. But airports are intentionally designed such that you have to walk pretty much the entire length of the terminal to go from arrivals to baggage claim.

This is how you get stuck in a local optimum.

Communicate that everything worked in a better way.

I read this somewhere as well in regards to airline flight searches (can't find the source unfortunately). The article claimed they introduce an artificial delay, so people think the website "worked hard enough" to find them the best price.

It makes trip planning (especially internationally) extremely frustrating.

Recall hearing a similar story about Kayak years ago. They found users were less likely to trust the search results if the page loaded too quickly. IIRC they found that 7 seconds suggested the right amount of "effort."

Sad, but relatively honest and harmless compared to room bait and switch.

If you import 2000 stock/crypto transactions into TurboTax, you can see when it really is recalculating, because the app freezes anytime you go to the next page.

Ya, this isn't a dark pattern. IIRC - They did this because they got customer service complaints from customers saying they didn't believe the results because they were used to older systems "sitting there and churning though numbers".

It's a dark pattern, because it's deliberately wasting everybody's time to cater to people who refuse to learn. It should instead say "verification complete in n milliseconds" (or n microseconds if the milliseconds number looks too small). There could even be a "details" link with a log of all the verification steps.

That's not really what dark pattern means. They're about tricking people into doing something they otherwise wouldn't.

It's tricking people into waiting for nothing.

This is getting pedantic but: it's not tricking people into anything. People don't have a choice. In a real dark pattern, you're trying to convince users to do something -- here, the users were going to (get their numbers verified, do the web search, whatever) anyway, it's just the illusion of doing more work.

It's shitty but it's not evil.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com