
Wait Wait Tell Me: The Psychology of Loading Screens - jacobedawson
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wait-wait-tell-me/
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nitwit005
Video games have the best loading screens at the moment, because people often
don't realize they're there. They slow the user down in a way that doesn't
feel like a wait.

Elevators are a common mechanic, but I appreciate more creative ones like
making the user open a heavy door (God of War), or climb up an obstacle.

~~~
zaarn
Even the presence of a plain loading screen like in DOOM can be done well;
there it provides a brief pause for the player to calm down again and it
prompts for a spacebar so you can grab a drink or check your mail without
issue. Plus it's fairly fast so in most cases you wait like 30 seconds.

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btrettel
Here's one personal irritation on this subject: Programs which appear to be
fully loaded, but don't allow you to do anything for a while. I'm solely a
Linux user now, but I recall that Windows would do this before I stopped using
Windows entirely in the late 2000s. Firefox does this pretty bad now. I
typically wait a few minutes after opening Firefox before doing anything.
After roughly a minute Firefox has autocomplete in the URL bar, but no
websites will load until I wait another minute or so.

~~~
saghm
> Firefox does this pretty bad now. I typically wait a few minutes after
> opening Firefox before doing anything. After roughly a minute Firefox has
> autocomplete in the URL bar, but no websites will load until I wait another
> minute or so.

Wow! I have maybe a dozen extensions installed, but even on my work laptop
(which is not very high spec), I can use Firefox easily within 10 seconds of
opening it. Do you have tons of tabs open and have it set to reopen the
previous session? I'm kind of shocked to hear that it could take this long

~~~
o-__-o
Also the configuration matters. Core 2 Duo with 4gb RAM running Windows 10
will suffer a swapping fate that not even I would wish on my enemies

~~~
rasz
Its a self inflicted problem, nowadays you can get perfectly fine 5-7 year old
computers for ~free at the recycling center.

~~~
ta999999171
Where is this recycling center?

~~~
o-__-o
Go look at ewaste companies and find out how they discard computers. Those 200
lot computer sales on eBay come from these companies and they buy old hardware
for pennies on the dollar. If you get them before they make it to eBay or
other distribution channels you can usually get another 20-50% off (I got a
sun fire v20 this way for $200 back in the day)

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slg
I am a regular 99PI listener and enjoyed this episode, but I was also a little
disappointed that they never discussed Sim City's notorious "Reticulating
Splines"[1] type loading messages that date back to the early 1990s.

[1] -
[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=reticulating...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=reticulating%20splines)

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Insanity
This article made me aware of how few progress bars I am actually aware of
nowadays. There are some, but they finish quite quickly. The slowest one would
probably be when IntelliJ is indexing.

Reminds me of all the times when I had to put the cursor at the edge of the
progress bar, just to see if it was actually moving or if an installer just
got stuck :D

edit: express myself better :)

~~~
reificator
Tip for when you're putting your cursor at the end of a progress bar: Zoom in
all the way so you can be sure of any perceived progress.

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cm2012
I saw data at a company where adding a fake loading screen to a tech product
increased conversion rate 5x - it made the product seem fancier.

~~~
corysama
That’s why TurboTax is 90% fancy loading bars breaking up work that takes
milliseconds in total.

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nevster
And then there are the ones that are back-loaded.

They zoom straight to 99% and then stay there.... Windows install programs,
I'm looking at you.

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catchmeifyoucan
Great article. Can confirm it works. Shared this with our team. We are
currently working with a slow loading service and added friendly text during
loads. Drastically improved the user experience. It's subtle but provides a
good win for our users.

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boomlinde
That users seem to prefer Buell's "operational transparency" is a good
takeaway from this.

A lot of websites and web apps use some spinning animation to signal that
something is going on. What exactly isn't clear to the user, and because these
spinners have a tendency to keep spinning when something goes wrong, they
can't be trusted. There's no sense of progress and really no sense of anything
going on in the background either.

If you instead display _what_ you're loading, even if it looks like
technobabble to the user, they will at least get a sense of something going
on. Even just not hiding what's going on on the page while resources are
loading seems preferable to me.

