I worked for a company that implemented a similar technique and it had positive results. The main features of one of their web based software products was a report generator. The report was quite complex and included a lot of calculations based hierarchical relationships of entities in the system. To build this report by hand would probably take hours, but the queries and calculations were all highly optimized and could be run by the server almost instantly.

Many users complained that they didn't like paying so much for this feature because it didn't really seem to be doing very much. Instead of trying to educate each individual customer about all the intricacies of the report they just added a dialog box that would display for ~10 seconds and step through a few fake progress messages. People stopped complaining about paying for the report, and I would assume that is because the progress messages made them feel like something complicated was happening.

We implemented a similar thing a few years ago at a company I worked at. We designed a very fast system zero-knowledge matching over zillion entries. It was way faster than the "competition" (which arguably were slow because they just never cared). It took a few hours instead of a few days to run, basically.

While the results were 99.99% the same as from the slower solution, customers would think "it can't be right" or other things like that, and wouldn't trust the product.

We'd just give the result a day later. Fighting with customers expectations is sometimes very hard.

Then sell them the more advanced faster one for more money.

"Use our advanced cloud infrastructure to generate reports in under 8 hours!"

This reminds of airport nowadays. They were getting a lot of complaints about the slow speed that checked luggage comes out of after landing, so they simply moved all arriving flights' gates to the furthest away possible from the luggage claiming area. People had to literally walk across the airport after they get off, but complaints about luggage speed dropped significantly.

Actually, if I remember well (ut can<t remember where I get that from), another reason was so that people walk a little while to let their back recover from slouching all the flight before they pickup their heavy suitcase. Meaning in the end they had to bring less people out on a wheelchair.

Maybe you mean this as a joke, but I am a wheelchair user, and it is often really not fun to push myself through the airport. So.... your joke falls a bit flat.

It wasn't a joke, I didn't explain myself properly. When some people pick up their heavy suitcase after slouching for a few hours, their back locks in and the airport has to put them in a wheelchair and take care of them and their luggage. Having people walk a few minutes more actually reduces the chances of that happening.

I don't think he was joking, but rather implying that people with stiff backs could be more likely to injure themselves.

I suppose it's the same mentality behind: "He's a manager..it doesn't seem like he's doing anything! His job is so easy!". You can replace "manager" with any management/leadership role.

Well, playing golf is hard!

And attending meetings.

This happens with old-fashioned customer support and technical troubleshooting, too. It seems to be the temporal equivalent of putting scrap metal in electronics to make them seem heavier and thus "more reliable". The more I hear about it, the more I believe it.

I ran into this while doing phone and ticket support back in the day and tried to get my coworkers to join me in an experiment but they refused. We could have learned so much. I wrote about it: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/07/14/difficulty/

This is a serious marketing problem about perceived value in B2B entreprise stuff. We had the same kind of problem the product was really technological: 15 years of research, a prover, 6-7 PhD and stuff like that. But I decided to simplify the interface to a minimum, and every parameter tuning should be automatic. We ended up with just a few buttons in a toolbar and a few views embedded in an eclipse plugin. Then the customers where thinking that an "eclipse plugin is not worth 10k€", because the technology was hidden.

Why do stories like this make me depressed.

Because (i'm guessing, since you're on HN) that you're an engineer. You spend all day telling the most logical thing ever created how to act. Its as predictable as a childrens television show. Human psychology is irrational, and thus unpredictable. The engineer psyche doesn't like that.

Human psychology is irrational and unpredictable only for very narrow definitions of rationality. Just because we don't understand the brains operation doesn't mean it doesn't behave rationally

Those definitions of rationality are useful _because_ they are narrow. If you redefine "rational" to mean "how the brain operates", you might be able to stop using the word "irrational", but...all the phenomena that previously fell into the "irrational" category will still exist, and people will still want to discuss them, so you might as well just use the same word for them as everyone else does.

The term "rational" is already well defined. I was claiming that the OPs understanding of the meaning of rationality was limited, not that the term rationality was narrow.

There are many other words and phrases available for us to talk about this concept that are well understood and do not need to be redefined.

I feel the same way.

My guess: it's hard to consider adults are less curious than children, but more confident than children. In biology: maturity = stop of growth

because stories like those should make you depressed

Now you've trained the users for the reduced app speed you can sell access to the advanced faster version.

Can't find the article right now (help?) but Blogspot (now Blogger) can create blogs instantly - the loading spinner and wait are completely artificial, to assure users.

I know there is data showing that adding meaningless security badges and icons to checkout designs increases users' perception of security, so I wouldn't be surprised if the fake progress bar was effective.

I'm not sure if there is a better solution that doesn't misrepresent what's actually happening. Users sometimes have heuristics about the way that systems work which might be inaccurate. In this case, the heuristic is something like "doing work correctly takes time; failure happens quickly", where work is keeping your credentials secure. The fundamental problem is that it is difficult for users to differentiate between work done poorly from heavily optimized work done well.

This is a totally a marketing technique to make users feel more secure. It's no different than plastering the "hacker safe" (now McAfee Secure) seal on the top of your website. (Which by the way, in tests I've seen split-testing proved the old "hacker safe" seal works better than the new one, or at least it did when the new one was first released).

Most of users don't know what SSL is, but they sure as hell feel more secure if you have a big lock or a nice green checkmark in the top corner, especially if they're thinking about putting in their personal info or credit card number.

Full disclosure: I'm a founder of an online marketing company. :-)

Paypal (even with a two-factor fob) has a similar spinning page when logging in.

Once I fell for a phishing link, and the first thing to tip me off was the loading indicator was gone/too fast. In that instance it saved my neck as I changed my password asap.

Maybe users who realize due to a missing indicator should be smart enough to avoid such a trap in the first place, but I was definitely glad then and can see how this could be an active UX decision with positive implications.

Zurb did a tech talk a while back. They found that the drop off rate for one of their long running processes dropped significantly when they added a red bouncy ball as an interstitial for any process that took more than 400 ms.

I wonder about why this is the case.

* Is it because we as users have been conditioned, through years of faulty software, to assume crap crashes/hangs when there are unexpected delays?

* Or is the majority of computing so fast and instantaneous that we can't bring ourselves to wait on something that doesn't have an immediate end in sight?

Here's one related study, "examining the extent to which individuals will tolerate delays when told that such delays are for security purposes..."

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/emcahk...

Please Continue to Hold: An Empirical Study of User Tolerance of Security Delays

I was expecting a page that takes forever to load or some such... :)

If I had to throw a guess, I'd say there was a random non technical manager in the company who saw the page was loading too fast and didn't like it; "it should show there is a heavy process in the background, otherwise our customers will think it is too simple!". Either way I doubt an UX genius is behind this.

It could be the opposite. Wells Fargo has a lot of different apps that need to authenticate and integrate with their identity management/sso system. It is near-trivial to implement this sort of thing, but it isn't necessarily trivial to make it fast.

I wouldn't be surprised if the authentication process was taking long enough that a decision was made to add some sort of "loader" like this to make it appear like the extra time was absolutely necessary from a security standpoint.

It's a bit of a lazy decision from a UX standpoint, but it isn't entirely uncommon either: when you notice some action is slow, slap an animation in front of it.

If I had to guess, I would say it was the opposite. The page was loading too slowly, so users would click submit a second time. So the popup was added so the users know their first click was received and the page is loading.

Seriously, users will resubmit forms if the next page doesn't respond in a 1000ms - 1500ms.

The more correct solution then would be to disable the submit button and provide some sort of (non-misleading) feedback that showed something was happening.

Ah, The good old Thread.sleeep(10000) to make it feel extra secure

There are no "UX geniuses". Or at least they are usually called Developers.

Actually UX designer is a pretty common job title these days. I'm pretty sure it's a well recognized profession.

I usually trust a developer to absolutely ruin the UX of a product any day

The level of contempt of some developers is amazing, too bad they don't know UX 101

I know developers who can design and code. The contempt is earned as most "UX monkeys" can just sling photoshop and that's the end of it. Too costly in any startup. Too useless in anything else.

I'm a developer and I am happy to leave the UX to someone who knows what he/she is doing. That goes far beyond "slinging photoshop" however. When I'm using a website or application I can usually spot where a developer did the UX, because it's quirky, "clever," uses conventions different from other parts of the system, or worst case is completely incoherent.

Depends on the platform. I've come to despise mobile UX monkeys if they can't write Cocoa. Period.

On iOS it's different, the developer knows the best.

Actually, The Sims 1 did this too. Obviously, it's a game and it's fluff so it's more acceptable than the bullshit that WellsFargo is doing here.

I was sad when Sims 2 and Sims 3 didn't include this little gem. A cool bit a humor while you're loading the game? awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwFsmQu71BE

The Sims 3 does actually :-). Though it's a bit less obvious, but look at the texts swapping in and out under the progress bar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiBLA4aPhcE

I don't know, but it demolishes the last shred of confidence I had that Wells Fargo had anything resembling a clue about technology, and security of web apps in particular.

I've used a few of their services before, and they are all horrible abominations from signup on through.

My $0.02: Banks will get hacked, your identity will get stolen but banks and their insurance companies see that as part of doing business. So far it has been quantifiable. But they want you to feel secure so you do everything online, it saves them in real estate and employees--even as fees skyrocket year after year.

Another "UX monkey" who thought this is an amazing feature.