It's also one of the irritating things about "Material Design" websites, where responses to clicks are artificially delayed before speeding out with unnatural acceleration. "Nothing is happening. JUST KIDDING!" I'm not sure if that is to mask the slowness of mobile devices or if it's the cause of them. It's the animation spam[1] of the current generation of UIs.
* [1] "Let's make our website sparkle. It will be 'delightful'." http://dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex3/snow.htm
Web browsers have progress bars.
I think your complaint is with "sites" that just serve a JS payload and then load "the real site" entirely from requests made by JS. Turns out if you generate and serve actual HTML, you get a progress bar for free!
If that isn’t the way we build sites now, either change the way we build sites or accept that it sucks. But this is Hacker News so we’re supposed to think about different ways to build sites than what we do now.
I would like to hear which ones they are, that I may try them.
It’s far from perfect but is at least a good enough heuristic for the user to know when the page is loading a request.
To be fair, depending on how the progress bar is implemented, it might not be a guarantee.
Basically, people complained about baggage claim taking too long, so they just moved the baggage claim area to the other side of the airport, so it took longer for passengers to reach it, by the time they did, their bags would already be there, so the complaints stopped.
That, my friend, is an impressive command of the English language.
Thank you for teaching me the word asymptotically! [0]
edit: I started browsing around their site, and when I returned to that page via the back button, the actual comic was there.
User's like to know what's going on, even if they maybe don't understand all the details, but at least they see things are happening and not just a (fake) progress bar. So they can connect more to what is happening and therefore be more understanding and patient instead of just being told to wait, with no further information, which nobody likes.
Could you give me an example of what you consider "vague, but accurate information?"
How do you visually represent "error bars" to someone who's not technical enough to have ever seen them? Not everyone takes college stats, math, and engineering.
Technically, wiggling within the error bars is a precise way of saying "the precise location is vague -- it's somewhere within this range", in that at any moment it is showing one precise, acceptable guess.
The most fascinating piece there was that as the error bars decreased, the range of the wiggling decreased as well.
Yeah, it doesn't convey the extend of the error bars instantaneously -- you need to stare at it over time -- but it does convey the idea of error bars.
I think the people upset about the error wiggle are either a) being pedantic that it's not visualized in the way they learned it should be visualized back in college; or b) they haven't accepted the idea that sometimes we don't have an exact precise black-and-white answer (we DO have ways to precisely quantify the degree of our uncertainty though).
All of this not to say it was the best execution... perhaps if they 'ghosted' previous needle positions like how old movie radars ghost a green blip as the thingie spins around, maybe it would have been a kind of hybrid approach where the error bars do kinda appear in the overlapping ghosting shadows but still change over time...
I guess the lesson to be learnt here is that people are more understanding if you appear to be transparent but you don't have to ACTUALLY be transparent to get the affect.
(You might want to mute it. The loading messages are at the bottom)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen another game than simcity give it a voiceover...
Fetching data
Processing query
Preparing for display
As a bonus, this can occasionally be useful for bug squashing. "I've been waiting for hours and it's only up to row 5681" when you know for a fact that there's <2000 rows is a lot more informative than "My report won't finish."
Most of them used to take a long time, but hardware has caught up. SSH key generation, locale installation. Instead, it's a warning that briefly appears on modern systems, but is visible for quite a while on, say, a Raspberry Pi.
I can't always give an accurate response because our scheduling is constantly being derailed by urgent tasks and the not-so-urgent tasks get complete in between.
People just want to know you haven't forgotten about them, throw in some light humour and a "I'll try to get it done before knock off tomorrow <wink wink>" and they tend to let me get back to working.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button
They add fake "close doors" buttons to the elevators, that arent connected to anything, but make people feel they have agency and it makes waiting for doors to close less frustrating.
[0] Can't remember which ones exactly.
http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines
And now lots of other games and web sites do it too, even compiling Firefox:
http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Reticulating_splines/Usage_outsid...
The "Stage 5" evacuation completion detection timer in Austin Powers could have used a tad longer debouncing delay:
I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Cross checking, Sorting" and other such nonsense.
The report now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse the "On Timer" event for it to work.
The users were delighted with the improvement.