[joshwayne]

I see a lot of comments condemning this feature and saying it's ridiculous. However, you have to understand that people outside of the tech industry have a very different mental model of how computers work than the rest of us.

One example of this is shown in a usability study by the Baymard Institute on top ecommerce checkout processes [1]. The goal of the study was to determine best practices for checkout usability by testing the top 15 ecommerce sites. One of the more fascinating finds they made was that during the checkout process, users perceived certain fields as being more secure than others. Even though the fields were all part of the same form and on the same page, users still believed fields with a little lock icon were more secure than the rest of the fields! It didn't matter if the entire page was encrypted. Users would abandon the checkout process because the credit card fields didn't "feel secure" compared to the rest of the page.

To most of us, this looks like a frivolous feature suggested by a "UX monkey" (as one commenter put it) but don't underestimate the power of making users feel safe. For all we know, this stupid gif could have cut support calls 20%.

[1] http://baymard.com/checkout-usability