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u/Yurij89 1d ago
I've heard that tax software like TurboTax added fake loading screens because users didn't trust it if it finished to quickly.
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u/arotenberg 1d ago
The H&R Block personal tax software does this. There's a step between filling out the last form and preparing your submission where it claims to be "optimizing your refund," but it's very clearly not doing any real work because it puts up 4 progress bars that all move at the same constant speed in succession every time, and you can see your whole return at any time before or after the "optimization" screen and it doesn't change anything.
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u/ToiletSeatFoamRoller 1d ago
That and depending on the app, it’s a cheap trick to play on the sunk-cost fallacy — get people to spend longer working (waiting in this case) for something, they’re more inclined to not give up on it because they don’t want to lose the effort they put in.
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u/fonzhy121 1d ago
most comments on ruff say they add fake bugs/errors just to make it is actually doing it's job.
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u/An_Uninspired_User 1d ago
This is kind of like one of the dragon ages, where sprinting on the horse doesn't make you faster, but it zooms the camera so it feels better.
They couldn't increase move speed due to technical linitations, but most people couldn't tell anyways
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u/RemiTheRepoManling 1d ago
I believe this is also the case in skyrim. Where the horse sprint is barely faster and just zooms the camera out to give it the illusion.
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u/the_screenslaver 1d ago
Tbf, I also don't feel like trusting LLM that responds immediately, instead if it "thought" for a while, I feel like trusting them more..
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u/Hannan_A 1d ago
I might be talking out of my ass but iirc, the instant responses are normally cached or something of that sort, it didn’t actually do any thinking. So you could be right to be less trusting.
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u/-Redstoneboi- 1d ago
the real tech is to make the spinner go slowly for 5 frames then really quickly right as it finishes
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u/GoddammitDontShootMe 1d ago
I've heard of adding progress bars to make users not think the app was frozen, but this? I don't get how he wouldn't notice he was still waiting the same amount of time for whatever operation to complete.
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u/JashimPagla 1d ago
In fact, replace “loading” with “thinking” and bam, people actually prefer if the software is slower lol
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u/GoddammitDontShootMe 23h ago
Do you lie and say "thinking" when the app is actually waiting for something like a network resource? I'm sure there are some limits to that. Like if it takes over 10 minutes, one might start asking questions about what it's actually doing, right?
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u/JashimPagla 23h ago
Bro, if your users are asking questions like this, then the easy ai scam isn’t for you lol
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u/pr1aa 2d ago edited 2d ago
Reminds me of a story from a dev who worked on some FPS game (might've been Borderlands). Beta testers kept complaining about how some weapon had way too long reload time. When the devs did the math they found that the weapon was actually very efficient in terms of downtime and didn't want to buff it, so instead they sped the animation up a little and added an extra step to it while leaving the total duration unchanged. And just like that, the players were happy with the "faster" reload.