This is one reason UIs have animations added, the kind that technical users like to complain about or remove. By making things feel more physically grounded they prevent users from getting lost and confused and give them more intuition about things.
In your case you could show more intermediate values, graph things, etc.
Re:Lessons from 14 Years at Google
by iosguyryan on Monday January 05, 2026 @03:52AM
(#46496616)
I often chuckle when (our) animations may have more complex math that consume more resources than the awaited logic/call that they gate.
We had to introduce an artificial delay of ~30 seconds to make it seem like it was taking a while to calculate, because users were complaining that it was too fast. They either didn't believe we really did the calcs, or they thought the system must have broken so they didn't trust the results.