Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking of these types of quotes for a while now "Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%." (from this first link in the post)

And kind of thought that no one believes in that anymore, that it was a 90s thing - at least when considering the absolute mad UX that is prevalent today. Some sites must deliberately pretend to process your decision for close to a second just to annoy you.

100ms latency is bad but privacy banners with stupidly obvious dark UI patterns (where they are even deliberately breaking the law) are worth it? In what universe does that make sense? There is something seriously ill with the web today.

Maybe this article is a cure. Not one I imagined but I'm intrigued.

Not only that but latency is introduced artificially to make users feel more confident about changes they've made.

https://uxmag.com/articles/let-your-users-wait

https://www.fastcompany.com/3061519/the-ux-secret-that-will-...

If the app or site isn't trying to sell me something then I don't see the draw. I understand the research around the marketing aspect but if I've already paid for something using a sleep() doesn't seem like it would make me trust something. I think I would rather ask why something is so slow (and doubly-so for anything on-prem which should be fast!).

If research shows users aren't sure if something happened then fix the UI to give some feedback to the user that their action was registered. This will likely involve a small delay even if it's just in the user's perception of the feedback but less than presented in the articles.

It's been much too long since I've run or participated in a UX study so maybe it's a good time to get back into it.

> Some sites must deliberately pretend to process your decision for close to a second just to annoy you.

Not just to deliberately annoy you, but also to try and sell to you.

If you go do your taxes on a very popular tax site, you will eventually get to pages that say things like "finding all your deductions!" or similar with progress bars. Well that's not really happening because that was done in milliseconds, instead that page is trying to upsell you to the Premium or Platinum or Uranium version.

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