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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

Like all things, know your audience.

I know of a case where a delay was introduced because users didn’t believe the task was done because it happened so quickly, and contacted support thinking there was a problem (there wasn’t).

All related support contacts stopped after the artificial delay was introduced.

As you may have guessed, these were not technically savvy users. But it’s what they needed.

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There are UX solutions that are not deceptive/time-wasting (e.g. a brief checkmark, but the actual solution will depend on many variables of the exact scenario).

How about dropping CPU clock speed until the computation actually takes avg 5-10 seconds?

This can happen to technically savvy users as well. For instance, when hard disks were only just becoming common, people were used to saving things to floppy disk, which was slow and loud. Hitting save typically meant the whole machine pausing for several seconds while you heard mechanical noises. When using hard drives for the first time, it wasn’t uncommon for people to keep hitting save repeatedly because they suddenly stopped getting the feedback they associated with saving. A similar effect occurs when moving from dial-up to broadband; and from whole page refreshes to Ajax.

In a way, this is kind of an indictment of modern software overall. Why doesn't the average person think that tasks can complete quickly? Because so much of the software they interact with is bloated, slow, terrible crap that they all think that's what is normal.

But on a more constructive note, perhaps instead of introducing artificial delays, you could instead show the user proof that the action has been completed?

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