Battling the Wait: Design Style (1/2)
Waiting is an integral part of our daily life, one way or another, we are all waiting for something. Waiting for the phone to charge, webpage to load, content to show, Food to deliver, Operating system to update and Friends to come.
This is what we do daily — Waiting, but why some waiting seems bearable and okay and other not so much?
As it turns out, The experience of the waiting depends on the various factors. One of those factors is the context of it. The wait of 5 minutes is nothing when we are waiting for our Uber to arrive. But try waiting for 5 minutes for a webpage to load. Can’t even imagine.
Reports from Google even mark the optimal loading time for a website(desktop or mobile) is around 2–5 seconds. More than that and the user will abandon your website.
Waiting is always going to be there, And as John Gooden correctly put, “Good Things take time.”,
And as the Internet speed is getting faster and faster each day, technology is getting more complex as well. Waiting is inevitable.
But, there must be something we can do, to optimize the experience of this inevitable waiting, instead of looking at the blank, frozen screen, we can do something which makes it worthwhile to the user?
In this two-parter article, I’ll talk about some of the methodologies, innovations, and designs that were used in our early and modern computer era, to engage users during the Waiting. And what worked for that approach, what problem did it solved, and what issues it raised.
And then in the next part, we will dig deep into the psychology of waiting, and what were the solutions created to tackle those issues, which transcended from our Computer world to our Actual Life.
The Loading Icon
One of the most recognizable designs that signify the waiting and tell us that something is happening inside the system, is the Loading Icons.
When these icons show up, the user gets feedback that the system is processing their request and they have to wait for it to disappear.
Some of the most prominent examples of the Loading Icons are:
- Windows Hourglass, more accurately knowns as the Wait Cursor, and
- The Macintosh’s Spinning Beach Ball, or more accurately, Spinning wheel of Doom.
These two are perfectly good examples of design innovation that went into their creation and they provided an alternative of User just sitting and waiting for something to happen.
Now, the user is sitting, watching something moving and, waiting for something to happen.
But now the issue arises that, we know something is happening, we know that content is processing, CPU is using its prowess to fulfill our request, but we have no idea on, how long will it take to do so, we don’t know how long we will be waiting for.
The hourglass or the beachball provided no opportunity for the user to know how long they’ll be waiting for. It might finish soon or, It might not finish at all, if there’s any internal issue that no one knows about.
And, since this approach was introduced in the early computer era — where the systems were not designed for multitasking, the User can’t use it for anything else while the process is going on. Essentially, the user is left with the option to sit there and watch nothing happen and see the hourglass pouring itself again and again, or hypnotize themselves with the spinning beachball.
This approach, even though made the wait intuitive — to an extent, didn’t solve the underlying problem, which is to enhance the waiting experience of the user.
The system is making the user wait, and the user doesn’t know how to utilize its time efficiently as there is no indicator of progress, this snatched the control from the user itself, which led to strengthening the intent of the Powerlessness within the User.
The Dot and The Bar
The early systems already had a process in the way, which allowed the user to see what is happening. The Dots. Those of you, who used or read about early machines, know that early machines used to print a dot on the screen at regular intervals to let the user know something is happening.
The user sees the sequence of dots printing one by one, and thinks “ok, something is going on.” And starts to build its expectation “I’m expecting three rows of dots, or this will be a whole screen full of dots, which will take me to approximate these seconds because each dot is taking around 3–4 seconds to print.” Hence, building their expectations in the way with minimal input from the system.
Just by providing this little bit of information about the progress the system was making, made the experience somewhat more bearable for the user. So now what new systems have to do is find a way to let the user know how long something might take. Which led to the invention of Progress Bar.
We all are familiar with the Progress bar, We see it daily in our Windows, Mac and our phones. It is a bar that fills up to show how long it would take the computer to finish the processing.
Added to that, Microsoft, Apple, and other tech giants started adding the “Estimated Remaining Time” timer to their progress bars as well, to showcase the required time left for the system to finish processing. This was a huge bump over the Dot-progress bar, because now, in contrast to the earlier system where the user has to build their expectations by guessing the dot sequence, Now the system is doing that as well and giving an accurate approximate time.
Now a certain level of control is handed back to the user and now the user can say “Oh, this process will take 5 minutes, I can get a cup of tea in the meantime.”
And the people liked this piece of innovation as well, it made them less anxious, and more enthusiastic, as now they are getting some relevant feedback on their waiting experience.
But this new piece of innovation brought some unexpected consequences as well. It failed to address the scenario where the progress bar failed because the computer stalled right at the end.
A progress bar is designed to give an accurate representation of the progress of the task and how much is remaining and it calculated the approximate completion time based on that as well. If the first 10% is completed in 10 seconds, naturally it would take 100 seconds to complete the entire thing, which is a logical conclusion of a logical system and we build our expectation for 100 seconds as well. But since a computer is a logical machine and progress of the operation is based on its computational prowess, Sometimes, it won’t take 100 seconds as well because of the system’s computational prowess bump.
The progress bar would be gliding towards completion smoothly, but at 99%, it stalls the entire progress because the system demands more power at that time.
Now the user felt completely betrayed and frustrated with this whole experience as it snatched the entire control away from the user leaving them with a negative experience.
But this behavior revealed some key facts about the psychology of waiting.
Things seem much slower than they really are, the key factor in this is our Expectations, whether it is file copying from one drive to another, or us standing in a queue to buy movie tickets.
The experience we get from the waiting binds completely with our expectations from the wait.
For example, when we stand in a queue, we immediately start assessing the situation of the queue, our relative position concerning queue and start calculating how long will it take for us to reach the counter by some arbitrary mathematical calculations. Hence, starting the Internal timer.
If we reach our goal before that timer, It is a positive experience, otherwise, a negative experience.
Because of this psychological trait, the designer started working on a new type of Waiting experience that has nothing to do with the actual system working, but solely focused on making the Experience of the user waiting positive by managing their expectations.
After Thoughts
In this first part of two-parter article about Battling phenomenon of Waiting by Design, we get to know what were the methods used by early designers to make sure user time is not wasted while waiting, some innovation worked, some didn’t — All are pretty much in use today (yes, even the hourglass one, you can modify your cursor to look like one — Windows). What made a good waiting experience, and what bad and what really stood out.
Different Problems, different stories and a different set of challenges behind each design, which helped us to understand the actual psychology behind creating a worthwhile Waiting Experience because this is what UX is all about — understanding the user and solving the issue which is invisible to normal eyes.
In the next section, we will dig deep into understanding what were the actual steps taken by Designers to nail that Waiting experience, creating new sets of Waiting Designs. And how an organization created an entirely new solution that revolutionized the entire Waiting Experience Design.
PS: I am starting a new job next week. Pretty excited about it.
PPS: I just hope I get to work on my articles, reads and other works as well. I love writing about things I find genuinely interesting and awesome.
If you find this write-up interesting, Do glance over my other work as well.
