[allenu]

I actually don't mind the occasional lying progress bar. I think TurboTax is famous for this, where they just toss in fake progress bars to indicate that they are crunching some numbers, which really just take milliseconds, if that. The goal is just to convey that "heavy work is happening".

I ended up using this strategy recently because I wanted to convey that my app was "doing work on your behalf", so I tossed in a super quick progress bar like TurboTax does and then did a slick transition animation to show the results. It's "unnecessary" in that I could've just showed you the results, but I really wanted to convey that there was a sort of cause-and-effect in the system. Without that little bit of animation, it felt like that would've been lost.

[cridenour]

When we built a real estate search site that worked on a more "lifestyle search" we had to do something similar. We could return results in about 250ms, but a large portion of beta testers gave feedback that it felt "shallow". Added a 4-5 second animation and loading bar, and people gave better feedback on the actual results, etc. Small sample bias? Maybe. But no one ever complained about the speed in the two years we ran it.

[wtallis]

Having some kind of transition to visually indicate a change of state is fine. But that's not what TurboTax does; they have a progress bar that is insultingly superfluous, because there's already a "next" button.

[jrochkind1]

It's worse. They seem to be intentionally slowing things down to make it look like the software is somehow "working harder" because to some people it justifies the high price. A progress bar that takes 5s or more to complete for an operation that actually takes under a second.

[jancsika]

Hell, the standard everybody seems to have converged upon is a mendacious progress bar where the user is not told what the percentage refers to (e.g., total install time? Number of files processed? Data left to be copied?). The frontend developer could show changing Matrix glyphs instead and the widget would be functionally equivalent but without giving the user false impressions.[1]

Given that as a standard, it's difficult for me to find more outrage for Turbotax misusing this already mendacious widget.

1: Some smarty pants is going to say that at least the percentage is directional and shifting Matrix glyphs are not. Unfortunately, even that isn't true-- UIs have a long history of multiple sequential progress bars with no indication how many there are in total-- see Office Space. So progress widgets have burned through user trust long ago-- even if I've experienced Windows 10 having a single percentage counter that persists across restarts, perhaps the next update will be the time they break that pattern.

[jrochkind1]

To me there's a big difference between intentionally slowing down the underlying operation (or the ability of the UI to go to the next step anyway) so you can show a longer progress bar, and just having a poorly designed uninformative progress bar on the underlying operation.

Not to you, really? I mean, I guess we can't argue about "how outraged you are", that's up to you.

Do you think those poorly designed progress bars are built to intentionally mislead? It's possible. For what end, do you think? The TurboTax one seems designed to intentionally mislead. Even if they both are, I still prefer one that isn't making me wait artificially longer than the software actually requires though.

[yeetman21]

People are willing to pay more for meals eaten with heavier silverware

[DaiPlusPlus]

I prefer cutlery that doesn’t easily fall out of my hands when eating though.

[lanternfish]

This sounds like it would be correct, do you know where I can find a source?

[tonyedgecombe]

Charles Spence at Oxford University has done a lot of work on this. It turns out just changing the colour of the plate impacts peoples perception of food.

[kortilla]

And slower service to boot!