Title: The Psychology of Waiting, Loading Animations, and Facebook
Context: Sometimes perception is more important than truth. Especially when giving the user feedback.
Synopsis: Milliseconds matter in application design. End users are notoriously impatient when waiting on a piece of technology to do something. No matter the unfathomable complexity involved with transacting data over the air, wires, and space between multiple servers in order to return you the piece of data you just request a whole .249 seconds ago. I don’t want to wait! So, knowing that most user’s have the patience and self control of a hyperactive 3 year old, how do you keep them engaged until you are able to give them what they want? Show them a spinning graphic! Just make sure it’s not yours. Otherwise if they are forced to wait another .063 seconds, they may start blaming you…
Best Bit: “This warning pertained to a Facebook test indicating that when their users were presented with a custom loading animation in the Facebook iOS app they blamed the app for the delay. But when users were shown the iOS system spinner they were more likely to blame the system itself.”
via mercury.io
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