Wait Wait Tell Me: The Psychology of Loading Screens | Hacker News Reader

Wait Wait Tell Me: The Psychology of Loading Screens

99percentinvisible.org

108 pointsjacobedawson36 comments

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.

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.

For those that are actually loading screen and not hidden like that, one type I like is those from the Assassin's Creed games where you can at least control your character.

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.

> 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

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

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

What's a recycling center? What if your country doesn't have them?

Where is this recycling center?

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)

That sounds like just literal self-punishment. If you want to use Core 2 you need some super lightweight DE like Xfce or LXDE. Windows 10? Come on. You will simply have to get some newer hardware to do anything with that.

That's actually my configuration at home. Don't really have any problems with it, can run Firefox and Visual Studio just fine.

Might be different if I did not have an SSD (from 2010) of course.

I don't save tabs. My laptop is from 2015, but not terrible. I use Xfce on Linux. Firefox was a fair bit slower before I upgraded from 4 GB of RAM to 12 GB.

Good lord, what have you done to your browser?

And of course they have to steal focus, sometimes several times, so you can't do something else while you wait.

This happens with Firefox on my work machine too. I use Firefox at home but Chrome at work for this reason. I just assumed something was glitching out due to some corporate group policy failure. But yeah, similar behavior: the Firefox window opens but is completely unresponsive for a minute.

That sounds odd to me. Do you have a lot of tabs or addons?

I don't save tabs and have about 10 addons. I'll try to see if any of them are the cause.

Edit: I should note that Firefox is only slow on the first opening after a cold boot. Firefox is fine after that. Might be some caching issue.

Edit 2: After a cold boot, Firefox loads quickly in safe mode. Disabling ABP did not seem to eliminate the problem. Disable NoScript seemed to help a bit. I might switch to uMatrix instead of those two and see if that helps.

If you do manage to find a solution, I'd love for you to share - I have this exact same issue.

For reference, re-installing FF doesn't seem to fix it, and I have neither NoScript nor uMatrix installed (although do have uBlock Origin).

(I've been meaning to troubleshoot it for a while, and if I manage to track down the issue, will let you know).

I have the same issue and my only active addons are procrastination guard and adblock. It happens at startup when there are no tabs, but I frequently have between 10 and 20 tabs.

Someone needs a $50 SSD.

Thanks for the recommendation. My laptop only has enough space for one drive, and I assumed that SSDs wouldn't have enough space for my needs. Glad to see that's not true at all, in fact, I can upgrade the space considerably. I'll go this route even if it doesn't fix Firefox.

That sounds like demand paging to me, try running from a RAM disk and see if it goes away.

I actually used to run Firefox from a RAM disk back in 2009 or so. I'll give it a shot again, thanks for the suggestion.

gmail is like that now.

It either loads in matter of minutes, or it displays last seen cached view... and loads in matter of minutes.

Fast, basic Gmail interface:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/?f=1

it only misses hangouts messaging, if it had that it would be perfect.

Still - the latest update to gmail was basically a downgrade from user perspective. It is slower, and looks the same and offers no new functionality.

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...

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 :)

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.

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.

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

Ryan Buell and Michael Norton's work seems to touch on this, calling it "labor illusion": https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=40158

I don't have a copy of the full text.

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.

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.

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.

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