[canadian_tired]

Well... story time. I had to implement a lying progress bar at the behest of my client. We could not reliably predict much...network speed, file size, moon phases, sock colour, etc would change things all the time. The client wanted to show the customer that "things were happening"... so we made the bar always move. The logic was that once it hit 90% or more, customers seemed to be invested and would wait forever. And yes, we tracked the abandonment percentage against progress bar percentage.

[dkersten]

What's wrong with using something like a spinner in that case though? The big issue with a lying progress bar is that it not only lies when things are happening, it also lies when things are broken, possibly wasting a lot of your users' time.

[fairity]

The goal isn't to save the user time. It's to maximize user conversion rate.

[dkersten]

You mean abandonment? Most progress bars are shown when I'm already using your application.

[canadian_tired]

Our most important users (read: $$$) were also the most sophisticated. They also appeared to like numbers... as numbers helped them when they complained back to us that our system sucked. If we took information (as bullshitty as it was) away, they accused us of hiding the truth. As Calvin said to the monsters under his bed... they lie, I lie. Our process was very heavily weighted near the end...so if you made it to 90%...and hung on, it would very likely finish. Again, you need to know your users and play to their strengths/weaknesses and track metrics.