

Why do users click randomly and rapidly when an application hangs? - hdragomir
http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/39413/why-do-users-click-randomly-and-rapidly-when-an-application-hangs

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gnaffle
In my experience, I simply do this as a way of polling the app to see whether
it's still working. A working app will often have the main gui loop running so
you'll be able to see the GUI respond to clicks, focus changes etc. If the app
doesn't do that, it's a sign that it's blocked waiting for something (network
or file access, for instance). Experience then informs me whether it's normal
for a certain app to behave in this way, and whether I should wait longer to
let it finish or just kill it off.

So for instance, a long time ago I was an Opera user on Linux. In certain
cases some bug would cause it to go on a memory eating rampage which would
slow the machine to a crawl of swapping if I didn't react quickly enough to
kill the process. I developed a very good sense at "smelling" when this was
about to happen, so I could react quickly enough to kill the process before
just switching over to the terminal would take something like a minute.

~~~
Foomandoonian
Same here. In addition, I usually attempt to perform an action that will
result in a visible response, like scrolling or selecting text, so that
if/when the app does start responding again, I'll see.

I also sometimes move the window or switch to another window to see if it's
the app or a bigger problem.

~~~
whattheken
I usually switch to another window or program as well, in the hopes that the
other window/program will distract me long enough to give the slow app an
opportunity to recover. If other windows/programs are slow as well, then I
start killing processes.

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colkassad
When I do this it's because I'm irritated that it's hanging and I hope that my
clicks will queue up and punish the insolent program. Kind of like sentencing
it to 2,000,000,000 cycles of hard labor.

~~~
mnarayan01
Fractions of a second of punishment seems far too little for this type of
crime. I think the program should be punished for at least whole seconds.

~~~
yareally
Not applications, but I will refresh unruly/bad ui web pages with a timed
auto-refresh (like every 5-10 seconds so I'm not overdoing it) with a 404 url
that leaves a log messages related to whatever the annoyance is (in hopes the
developer/sys admin will perhaps see it). If it's a really angry message, I
will sometimes give an apology message a while later when I'm not so annoyed
:)

~~~
mnarayan01
Heh. Though speaking just for myself, I disable 404 notifications if there's
no referrer, so I'd only see it if I happened to be trawling through the log
with extreme care (i.e. never). If other developers are like me, you might
want to use curl (or whatever) so that the referrer is actually set. In
fact...I may start doing this.

~~~
yareally
Didn't think about it being filtered on no referrer, but that would make sense
after thinking about it and why. I end up doing it hoping it has a better
chance of reaching someone with the power to fix stuff in some of the larger
companies. Going through the PR front end sometimes feels like a lesson in
futility so might as well try to make it fun and hope someone listens while
defusing web rage :)

Thanks.

------
ilitirit
In Windows, moving the mouse about can actually prevent certain processes from
hanging.

eg.

<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702>

~~~
chrislomax
Honestly when you read that as an actual solution it sounds like a joke

~~~
hdragomir
Oh, the number of bugs I've fixed by performing "unrelated" and silly
actions...

------
golgo13
My 17 month old plays with several numbers and letters apps on my Surface. If
the app hangs even slightly, she taps over and over until the app reacts
again. I find it interesting that even she does the rapid fire tapping as
well.

~~~
alan_cx
I have a similar aged lad who uses his pad just like all the other much older
kids do. Just want to say what an amazing thing it is to see kids so young so
easily and comprehensively using these touch screen devices.

As an example, he can search YouTube for The Number Song, which has already
taught him to count to 100. Alphabet 90% reliably correct too, not to mention
shapes and colours. He has been using pads since he was about 15-16 months,
something like that, he is now 2 years 3 months, and I still find it
incredible. Way ahead of my other kids.

In an ideal world, I would love for every child to get one of these, plus an
internet connection, free from what ever education department, when the hit,
say, 18 months. Yeah, I know.....

What I don't know though is whether its a good thing or a bad thing? To this
40yo Dad, something seems sad about seeing him there, on the sofa, with his
face lit up by his "Samsung". But equally, it seems like a modern miracle.
Even though he still like books,, actual toys, running about in the garden,
pulling the cat's tail, giving his food to the scrounging dogs, it still
_feels_ like he is being robbed of something. I suppose thats my age or
generation, or something stupid.

As for the pad hanging, he now has patience, and simply waits. He used to tap
away, then hold the pad out for one of us to fix it, but now he just waits. If
he gets no response after a while, he restarts the pad.

~~~
lotharbot
Your kid might enjoy "The Big Numbers Song" from the KidsTV123 youtube
channel. After 100, it counts by powers of 10 up to 1 trillion.

Mine is a little older (3 years 4 months) and has graduated to spelling and
skip-counting, mostly on the "havefunteaching" youtube channel.

He's also learned which apps seem to respond well to extra taps. There are a
few that do, and a few that just require patience.

------
tokenadult
A psychologist friend whom I just asked about this said that in animal models
of behavior, this is called an "extinction burst." Animals that have been
conditioned into a behavioral response through operant conditioning will often
be found, after a reward is no longer given for the conditioned response,
repeating the response often and with random timing. Sometime human beings are
trained by their computers rather than exercising volitional control over
their computers.

~~~
moheeb
Ha! That totally reminded me of my dog. He begs and begs for a treat, and when
he finally realizes he's not getting his nth treat that day he totally
"extinction bursts" and starts ramming his head into things.

Stand clear when he does that, he's a big dog!

------
mattmcknight
I often hit the caps lock key (once) to see if the indicator light comes on to
tell if the whole computer is dead.

~~~
hdragomir
This was my favorite test as well, back in the day.

~~~
Achshar
Why back in the day? It should still work just as effectively.

~~~
Dylan16807
Sure does. Did you know that you can _still_ entirely lock up windows simply
by having a bunch of programs access the hard drive too much at once?

(And last time I made linux thrash it wasn't any better. Why is it so easy to
keep the system responsive when a program or two hogs the CPU, but so hard
when they hog disk I/O.)

~~~
gizmo686
I haven't actually looked into this question, but I suspect the problem isn't
so much that the system isn't responsive when I/O is hogged, but rather that
individual programs are not responsive. On my computer, I occasionally get
into a congested hard drive issue, and almost all programs I am running are
incredibly non-responsive. However, my window manager (awesome), and virtual
terminals stay snappy during this period. This is in contrast to when my CPU
starts getting thrashed, when even those begin to get unusable.

~~~
Dylan16807
In my experience the core UI systems usually lock up. I can't use even the
simplest already-active non-memory-allocating programs. And can you explain
caps lock not responding for 8 seconds without 'total system lockup'?

------
gocard
If someone was standing in front of you, and you asked him a question, and
after a 30 seconds didn't get a response, would you just stand there, or would
you prompt him again to figure out why he didn't answer? Maybe say it louder,
because he didn't hear the first time. Or perhaps he's confused, and you can
clear that up by asking your question in a different manner. You wouldn't just
stand there waiting forever, however.

People begin clicking, typing for the very same reason. You're trying to
figure out why a response wasn't given. You click again to make sure that your
click registered the first time. If it wasn't the application will now
respond. If it was, now you're trying to decipher whether the application is
hung or not, or perhaps something did grab focus, like a pop behind, as a
commenter suggested.

I guess I don't find this a particularly interesting investigation of human
behavior. What's the alternative for the person? Sit there and wait forever?

------
cuillevel3
I've been using computers for over 20 years and believe me, every one of these
actions has worked at some point.

Clicking might get the application into another state, or at least get the
operating system involved in killing it of. Pressing return might answer
hidden input fields (wrong focus, broken modal dialogs). Pressing escape might
help exit one of these. Pressing ctrl-alt-del gets the OS involved... etc.
etc.

What UI experts ignore, is the fact that a crashed/freezing application is no
longer in a well-defined state. Therefore the apps logic no longer applies.

------
aptimpropriety
An analogy that comes to mind - physical exercise. When you are stopped doing
exercise (e.g. running at a traffic light), people often will jog in place.
Obvious reasons - keep heart rate from large deltas, muscles warm/responding
well, etc.

If you watch competitive PC gaming, you will notice that even professional
gamers will often 'spam' their hotkeys in low activity periods, typically the
beginning of games. Some people claim that it is simply for actions-per-minute
stats, but I could see it as some kind of setting of mental/physical cadence.

~~~
ArikBe
I don't think that the analogy holds. Jogging in place is to maintain movement
and keeping the body warm so that it's easier to continue running when you can
run.

Spamming before a round starts is done in order to fire off an action before
your opponent or just as soon as possible.

Neither scenario is analogous to a non-responsive software application because
everything is in fact responsive. If the stop light is red, then that's
temporary, it is in fact the whole purpose of the signal. Only if the light
hangs for an abnormally long amount of time do people get nervous. In the game
scenario, there's usually a countdown to the round starting, so again nothing
is frozen.

~~~
Dylan16807
No, not before a round starts. For a concrete example, in starcraft all you
normally do in the first minute is build up your worker supply and make 1-2
buildings, maybe send a scout. But you'll see players hitting hotkeys to view
their base, no view over here, no view the base, now use the mouse to select
all the workers, now do it again 7 times, now give this one ten move orders to
the same spot as fast as you can click... They're not trying to get an action
done faster, they're not even hitting keys that do anything, they're just
constantly spamming input.

------
frogpelt
People want to feel they have some level of control over a negative situation.
This is why people will take a way home that is 15 minutes longer to avoid a 5
or 10 minute delay caused by a traffic jam. It's also the reason people are
sometimes afraid to fly but not afraid to drive, even though it's generally
far more risky.

Perhaps clicking repeatedly is an outlet for trying to control an application
that has developed its own agenda.

------
joshuak
This highlights what is in my opinion one of the biggest failings of modern
operating system/GUI design (this and modal dialog boxes, but don't get me
started). We are used to interacting with things in a physical world. When
they fail it's their functionality that fails not their interface. If your DVD
player breaks you can still push the buttons. Even if your computer breaks you
can still press the keys, but when GUI apps break the interface itself stops
working, and given all the work that has gone into helping you to believe that
GUIs are just extensions of reality it's like reality stopped working.

I have always felt that GUIs should run in their own nonblocking thread at the
system level so that you can still use the interface to interrogate the
functioning of the program. I try to do this in my own programming. Even if
the brains die, buttons still push, the focus still changes the menus still
drop down, no bazar interaction queueing and if it's expectd behavior the app
could respond by providing info like a waiting on IO light. If it's unexpected
then the lack of response would be telling. As it is no information is
communicated.

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thefifthsetpin
I remember that whenever a printer crashed at my university, its queue would
fill up as people kept queuing additional copies of whatever document they
were trying to print.

Thankfully the permissions on the print queue were loose enough that we lay
users could purge the impatient people's documents from the queue rather than
waiting for the printer to churn through their duplicate requests.

------
ck2
I'm off to patent:

Method to detect an application has hung

\- by when a user repeatedly clicks randomly in a short time period of time

~~~
yen223
And they say the halting problem can't be solved!

------
viraptor
Actually this makes a little bit of sense these days on linux (or maybe it's
gnome-specific?) An application that's unresponsive will just hang there, but
if you try to interact with it and it doesn't respond you'll get the "do you
want to kill it" dialog. Of course that's important only in case you really
want to kill it - it won't fix anything.

------
maggit
Mildly related, and mildly humorous: After the last update to my phone I've
started randomly experiencing dips in responsiveness. It might be doing GC or
some other heavy tasks, but it remains in low (not zero) responsiveness for
several seconds.

Whenever I experience it, I start tapping the back-button furiously, in a
quick steady rythm, causing a pileup of tap-events. These will be dispatched
in batches, each tap causing a small buzz in the vibrator engine. When the
buzzes start happening at an even pace, I am back to having a responsive
phone.

The purpose of this behaviour is to know when my phone is usable again, but it
kind of evolved from me just wanting to see if I could provoke it or whatever.
People are curious things.

------
MindTwister
For me its:

1\. Click on chrome to see if the window responds

2\. Click on enter to make sure any hidden modals are accepted

3\. Alt+F4, die bastard die

4\. Ctrl+Alt+Delete, kill it with fire

~~~
marcosdumay
Hidden modals is the kind of fun people miss in KDE.

But when I use Windows, I'm not bold enough to just click enter on whatever
I'm not seeing to get the program back. I'll kill it on control panel before
that.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I use KDE and there are two situations where I get "hidden" modals.

One is when FF decides I need to enter my master password more than once - eg
a restart that opens more than one page that requires authorisation.

The other is when an app crashes, if there are multiple crashes then the crash
reporter hides subsequent error dialogs.

What's most frustrating is when the ordering gets broken, probably due to my
interactions, and one can't click the topmost dialog as it's blocked by a
later dialog.

Generally the dialogs aren't hidden because you see them on the application
bar but with grouping on (the default) they get hidden within the group. It
might be worse with things like sloppy focus or focus stealing prevention set
differently.

If I can't see a dialog on MS Windows I'll try Alt-Tab then hit escape, then
Alt-F4, then try and bring up task manager ...

------
kalleboo
I used to do this in the OS 9 days, but these days of no swapping (lots of RAM
and SSD) and OS X where the window manager never hangs and we have the
pinwheel cursor for apps that stopped responding to UI events, I've stopped
doing it (at most I'll move the cursor around in circles frantically to ensure
there's no hardware/disk freeze, or scroll up/down to see if there's one of
the frequent Safari WebProcess freezes).

Do any other OS X users do this, or is it limited to Windows/Linux? Is it due
to poor feedback?

------
reiche
It's the digital form of "Percussive Maintenance" -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percussive_maintenance>

------
bloaf
Sometimes I do it to try and get the program to crash instead of just hang.
Software is pretty stable these days, so sometimes it feels good to see a
complete crash to the desktop.

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drewcoo
I think a better question is "why don't we harness that behavior to make our
apps 'feel' more responsive?" If we make UI for humans and humans act like
that then why not give them a reactive but non-functional button to click to
"make it faster"? While waiting for a light to change at a crosswalk I feel a
lot better if I can hit a button on a pole instead of just standing there
feeling helpless. Even if I know the button won't do anything.

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jakerocheleau
Reading in the comments this also gave me a chucke as I have caught myself
doing it constantly:

"ctrl+c ctrl+c ctrl+c, just to make sure :)"

~~~
joshbaptiste
Since I'm always in some sort of tmux/screen terminal, I find myself cycling
through some combination of Ctrl+a q,Cntrl+q to make sure I didn't turn on
flow-control (Ctrl+s).

~~~
mitchty
This is why I have stty -ixon in my profile. I never use flow control anyway,
not sure why I want it on.

------
Spooky23
On Macs, randomly moving application windows when an app hangs often helps
when beachballs pop up.

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indrax
Possibly related to operant conditioning with intermittent reinforcement.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_rei...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_reinforcements)

~~~
jakejake
It does look eerily the same as the documentaries when you see a monkey being
trained to put a ball in a cup or whatever and then receives a treat.

When the treats stop coming, the monkey will start performing the action
rapidly and repeatedly for a little while - hoping the rewards will start
happening again!

------
bradleyland
I suspect many people do this for the same reasons that we yell at other
drivers from within the sealed environment of our own car. There's very little
chance that the other driver will hear us, but it provides an outlet for
frustration.

------
zwieback
Reminds me of the entry _plokta_ in the jargon file so it must go back to the
beginnings of time:

<http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/P/plokta.html>

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justzisguyuknow
In India I found that there's a widespread belief that refreshing the desktop
(on Windows machines) makes things go faster, and some people do so repeatedly
while waiting for slow computers to load heavy programs.

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grimman
Quite a few very entertaining responses. Unfortunately the clicks aren't
"random" as indicated in the question; therefore this is not an easily tapped
source of entropy.

------
brandan
i click and highlight and such out of boredom, similar to how i tap my fingers
when waiting or thinking. if i click while a program is 'hanging,' it isn't
out of frustration or expectation of a response. people actually do that for
those reasons?

------
Dirlewanger
So glad I took Principles of UI Design in school, made me appreciate this
answer much more.

------
nnq
...because the alternative will be smashing my cup of coffee in the display :)

------
ricardobeat
Focus. If the window can't be brought into the foreground it's dead.

------
APB
I guess it's the equivalent of shaking a radio, or patting a TV.

------
vacri
Misclicks are common, and it's normal to click two or three times to get
something right - how many times have you mousedowned on a button, but had the
pointer move off the button before mouseup?

Also, very occasionally, an application will respond to a click where it
previously wasn't, and faint hope is better than no hope.

