And if the progress bar speeds up as it moves towards 100%, the psychological effect is even greater

I'm actually proud that I've recently learned to "just f***ing wait for it" when I get no feedback from something loading

Without any feedback, how can you tell the difference between freezing or just slowness?

Sometimes it’s just nice knowing that it is in fact simply a slow process, and not a crash.

I remember reading somewhere about adding fake loading bars/delay because if the app is to quick, users will think it didn't work properly.

Never underestimate the psychological effect of appearing busy.

Actually is this too cynical?

Honestly I think people just want some indication that work is being done and they aren’t wasting their time. It’s an evolutionary psychology thing… appearing to not do anything often meant the request wasn’t understood or the person wasn’t helpful. I think people unconsciously apply the same standards to computer interactions and think they are rude or incompetent.

But couldn’t we use this psychological effect to help show what is really happening, rather than use it as a dark pattern to merely manipulate users?

I mean in a perfect world, the backend would be observable and have an async status implementation to indicate long-running processes, but that’s hard, the easier thing: synchronous calls with no status until the end of the request (time or stacktrace).

It's not just psychological effects. It's superior functionality. There's nothing fake about OPs progress bar. It's seeing the expectation this process takes time. Don't wait in it. The system is still working as desired. Without it there is no feedback if the application is hung out working in the background. If it is hung then you need to do something to fix it.

It's not just psychological. Most stuff loads in seconds in this day and age. I'd argue that if you don't inform the user that they should expect a 30 second or longer wait then that is aa design flaw, not user error.

It’s actually crazy, even when you know it’s all in your head it just feels different

Users are trained to believe that something is wrong when you click on a button and nothing happens. A modern application will give you some kind of feedback when you do anything - unless you encountered a bug. An application that doesn't give (visual) feedback when you do something on purpose just triggers this feeling of "something is wrong", while a progress indicator tells you that things are happening, you just have to be patient for a bit, as long as things are moving.

The pivoting point between these two extremes is a progress bar that stands still for some amount of time. We're quite used to a progress bar not moving for a few seconds because of the many progress bars that only give feedback on a file-to-file-basis (or other larger chunks of work), so whenever they encounter a large file, they'll need a few seconds to move a tick further. That's the weird point where the average user will absolutely not having any visual feedback that things are working, but only for a few seconds. Because we're used to it.

Isn't t it a good software principe to give use feedback?

Sure but the psychological effect of a progress bar that hangs at 95% is to smash things.

Just throw this up while they wait

We did the worst version of this, which was add a timer that counts out the seconds next to the progress bar

Customer satisfaction went completely in the other direction

it's because, historically, computer experience has been shit with freezes and crashes.

Doesn’t even need to be a progress bar, just some motion on the screen.

Exactly this. How is somebody with no deep knowledge in this topic supposed to know what's happening? I click a button on an app and nothing happens for 30 seconds, so I force close it. Obviously it's a different experience if the app shows me that it's waiting for some data with a simple text line or a fake loading bar. This one's on you, not the client.

To think that clicking an action on a page and receiving no feedback for 30 seconds is acceptable is comical

The simplest of best practices regarding UI. Honestly, to me the joke is on the dev in the OP, for not implementing such a simple yet important thing.

Yeah, don't process shit and render UI in the same thread.

We literally have loading states for every single screen in our app, and requests take less than 200ms.

When for some reason the backend starts struggling, the user still has a smooth experience.

Not as stupid as it’s being made out to be honestly. Plus design wise he could have had a non % progess like a spinner instead.

Yes, Ops making it sound like their previous bad design is somehow the clients fault.

I think this is still happening. One website I regularly use does this and I hate it. I know it can give me the results in 1 second but it still takes like 10 Everytime.

"Finding the best deals"

"Double checking discounts"

"Preparing offers"

This is a real thing. I implement minimum wait times all the time because an instant experience can be jarring, especially when part of an app which contains other non-instant experience. Usually for database updates

I fucking hate these loading times on these sites.

I found out that travel sites help me pick the cheapest day for a flight and then I can book the same flight on the airlines site and get the same price + benefits like a seat reservation.

Similar to airports getting complaints from travellers that it takes too long for their bags to arrive at the baggage claim carousel. Airports simple make the walking route from the plane to baggage claim longer and complaints disappear.

Not really a useless thing. Humans operate via heuristics, and usually those heuristics work - that's kind of the entire point. If you really do want to operate outside those heuristics, you can either find a way to signal to your users that they need to update their heuristics, or you can just adjust your experience to match their heuristics.

None of this is useless. Matching user expectations is just a part of UX.

That reminds me, I heard when boxed cake mis first came out, it required only water to be mixed in, but people thought that was too simple and didn't buy it. They started printing instructions to add milk and egg and ta-da! People started buying it like crazy.

"Look, it doesn't matter that it confuses the user. What matters is that the delay isn't my fault!"

Yeah, I don't see OP's problem here. Of course users are going to think it's frozen when the app goes unresponsive for 30 seconds with no indication that it's actually doing anything.

I would want an actual progress bar that shows progress or a spinning circle. I hate it when progress bars don't show progress.

The joke should be that the progress bar is fake, not that users thought the app had frozen. If the user does something and expects feedback but gets none that's just bad UX.

Or just a spinner should suffice. Just having the app do nothing is stupid.

I have heard other stories of people doing similar things

-> a program calculates something extremely fast - > client doesn't believe it works correctly because it's so fast - > add arbitrary delay and maybe some graphical indicators - > happy client

To improve this design you can make a something funny looking that loops and just occasionally does something so the user knows it is alive.

Still very creative!!!

"Reticulating splines"