Artificial waiting in user interfaces (2016)

Reminds me of an experience I had in a college C++ course.

The professor was notorious for being a real tough grader. For my final project, I wrote a command line file encryption/decryption program. But, it encrypted and decrypted practically instantaneously. Since we had to demonstrate the program real-time in the computer lab to him, I was worried he wouldn't believe it actually did anything. So I added a delay and a progress bar for effect.

When I demonstrated the program, as the progress bar was going, the professor audibly said "oh good!" I was thinking in my head "oh yeah!" So I guess the effect worked.

He still docked me 5% points because the final decrypted file had an extra newline at the end. LOL

It seems like this is being used as a cheap tactic to avoid giving users meaningful and accurate feedback. Eg the loan approval example, if the user was presented with the details of what got them the approval instantly, it might be more convincing than an instantaneous response with no rational. The artificial wait just gives the space for the user to make up a cause for the delay and walk away with a completely incorrect perception about how the system works, which is great if your goal is to manipulate people’s behavior using psychological tricks.

The first thing I do on a new windows PC (and android phones nowadays) is turn off all the animations, menu fades etc. for an instant performance boost.

I wish I could also disable those lightbox image loaders on web pages that slowly fade in images, as if the webmaster was worried that displaying it too quickly might give someone a heart attack or something.

The public has been duped into accepting slow interfaces, and it pisses me off!

I don't like the restaurant analogies. If it were possible to cook a steak to your liking in a single minute, you might worry the first few times that it was just being prepared ahead of time, not cooked fresh. But that should pass when you eat the steak and enjoy it.

Similarly, it might take some adjusting to really fast UIs, but I feel like we'd be better off adjusting rather than this nonsense.

I suspect the more people know about this, the more likely they are to not like being delayed, but then again, general "bloatyness" seems to have taken over (and maybe even using this as an excuse) in UIs, and a certain group of people seem intent on trying to manipulate and otherwise persuade users to be less knowledgeable...

The right mindset shouldn't be "[assuming] it must have been really hard to get that information", but rather "we now have computers that can do billions of operations per second, and it takes how long to do what!?" Every time I come across a webapp that is probably making me wait, maybe just to show a UI, that's what comes to mind.

This is an interesting psychological effect. Sure, it wastes time but people seem to expect/need it in order to trust a system.

There has been some research on effectively using wait time, such as doing small educational tasks while something loads, that I wonder if they could be integrated for a win-win. For example: Wait-Learning: Leveraging Wait Time for Second Language Education (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2702267)