Why Some Apps Use Fake Progress Bars – The Atlantic

In a fit of productivity, I did my taxes early this year. They were a bit more complex than usual, so I set aside some time to click through TurboTax and make sure I got everything right. Throughout the process, the online tax-preparation program repeatedly reassured me that it had helped me identify every possible tax deduction I qualify for, and made sure I didnt make any mistakes. Attractively animated progress bars filled up while I waited for TurboTax to double- and triple-check my returns.

But as I watched one particularly slick animation, which showed a virtual tax form lighting up line by lineyellow or greenI wondered if what I was seeing actually reflected the progress of a real task being tackled in the background. Did it really take that long to look over every detail of my returns, which is what the page said it was doing? Hadnt TurboTax been checking my work as we went?

I sat down with my colleague Andrew McGill to figure out what was going on in the background. We combed through the source code powering TurboTaxs website, and soon confirmed my suspicion: The animation was fixed. It didnt appear to be communicating with the sites servers at all once it began playingand every TurboTax user saw the same one, which always took the same amount of time to complete. (The same went for at least one other page which purported to show the progress of TurboTaxs checks for every possible tax break with three animated bars.)

But why? Why misrepresent how long it takes to complete a process, and take up unnecessary time doing so?

Its not because TurboTax delights in messing with its clients. Instead, the sites artificial wait times are an example of what Eytan Adar, a professor of information and computer science at the University of Michigan, calls benevolent deception. In a paper he published in 2013 with a pair of Microsoft researchers, Adar described a wide range of design decisions that trick their usersbut end up leaving them better off.

Benevolent deceptions can hide uncertainty (like when Netflix automatically loads default recommendations if it doesnt have the bandwidth to serve personalized ones), mask system hiccups to smooth out a users experience (like when a progress bar grows at a consistent rate, even if the process its visualizing is stuttering), or help people get used to a new form of technology (like the artificial static that Skype plays during quiet moments in a conversation to convince users the call hasnt been dropped).

The word deception has a negative connotation, and lying to users is generally frowned upon. But Adar says its actually a useful, beneficial tool if deployed correctlyand that designers have been tricking their users for years, even if they preferred not to think of it that way.

Curiously, the case of the TurboTax animations is a departure from most of the deceptive practices Adar studied: Rather than covering up a system slowdown, its introducing one. The delay, it turns out, is meant to build customers confidence in the product to which they just entrusted all their financial information.

The process of completing a tax return often has at least some level of stress and anxiety associated with it, said Rob Castro, a spokesperson for TurboTaxs parent company, Intuit. To offset these feelings, we use a variety of design elementscontent, animation, movement, etc.to ensure our customers peace of mind that their returns are accurate and they are getting all the money they deserve.

Adar made a similar decision in a game he designed as an experiment nearly two decades ago. The game, which involved two people negotiating on a price on two separate mobile devices, culminated in a complex step: Both participants bids were encrypted, transmitted wirelessly, and compared, and a software program would show whether or not a deal could be reached.

Despite its complexity, this step was nearly instantaneous in the games first iteration. But the speed confused people. Their reaction was, Wow, was that it? Adar said. That was sort of a bummer for us. He devised a tweak: Instead of happening immediately, the final step launched launched an onscreen animation, which took over the screen with asterisks

The security theater appeared to work. Their delight seemed to increaseand maybe their confidence as well, Adar said. (The difference was anecdotal; the researchers never formally tested participants reactions.)

Although designers dont always like to talk about it, the practice of building in artificial waits isnt uncommon. Last year, Fast Companys Mark Wilson discovered that Facebook uses the same trick on its safety page. He turned up other examples, too: a loan-approval app that builds suspense before delivering results to avoid making customers suspicious, and a site for delivering personalized phone-plan recommendations that slowed down its response time in order to convince users they were actually getting custom results. Examples abound on Twitter, like this progress bar on a Verizon webpage thats just a timer.

Wilson cited a 2011 paper from a pair of Harvard professors that studied this effectthey named it the labor illusionin detail. They found that websites that made their operations look easy were actually less satisfying to consumers. When websites engage in operational transparency by signaling that they are exerting effort, people can actually prefer websites with longer waits to those that return instantaneous results, they wrote. Even when those results are identical.

But not every benevolent deception is designed to make people think the system theyre interacting with is in total control. One trick in particular injected uncertainty into a visual representation of dataand triggered near-heart attacks across the country.

The online election-day dashboard on The New York Times included a set of three dials across the top, displaying the newspapers best guess at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trumps shares of the popular vote, their electoral college votes, and their chance at winning the presidency. Throughout the night, the needle on each of the gauges danced and wiggled, starting in what appeared to be deep Clinton territory and ending, well after midnight, squarely on a Trump victory.

The needles were in constant motionback and forth, back and forthadding to the anxiety of the moment. A few enterprising readers dug into the pages source code, found that the needles were jiggling randomly, and let out their rage on Twitter. More than one person used the word irresponsible.

Gregor Aisch, one of the Times designers behind the election dashboard, justified the needles quiver on his blog the following week. The needle only wandered within the margin of error of the forecast at any given moment, Aisch explained. The movement was designed to emphasize the live, ever-changing nature of the forecast, while visualizing the uncertainty included in the models output. The forecast became more precise as the night wore on, and so the needle jittered less and less.

I asked Aisch whether the blowback to the anxiety-inducing dials made him to reconsider any of his teams decisions. It didnt. The visualization accurately depicted what it was meant to, he said, and hed use a similar tactic if he were designing the dashboard again. The negative response may have really been misdirected anger at the vote tally, he predicted. During election night, we were simply the first ones to destroy the hopes of a lot of people, Aisch said. Hence, we took the fire.

The one thing Aisch said hed do differently is not to display each candidates chance of winning as a percentage. To most, he said, an 80 percent chance of a Clinton win seemed like a home run, when it fact, her victory was far from certain. Nobody would ever trust contraceptives if their chance of failure was one in five, but we made many people believe that Clinton had a clear advantage, Aisch said.

When Twitter users pulled away the curtain and Aischs deception was revealed, some felt theyd been maliciously tricked. A deception, after all, works best when its deceiving people.

I asked Adar if there was a point at which deception crosses from benevolent to malevolent. He set down three ground rules: Designers should prefer non-deceptive solutions to problems, their deceptions should measurably improve the product, and the userif askedshould prefer the deceptive solution. (Of course, most designers wont have the chance to ask their users whether or not they want to be tricked, so they have to make that call on their own.)

But a deception thats beneficial to a user doesnt necessarily have to set the designer back. In fact, Adar says, a good deception usually benefits everyone involved: Happier users keep coming back to useand perhaps pay fora well-designed service.

Take the TurboTax example. Its design touches may make customers less stressed during tax season, and make them feel better about their finances. They, in turn, will come back and keep paying for the service every year.

But TurboTax has another incentive to keep the process from moving as quickly as possible. Its service is a friendly guide through the thorny jungle of credits, benefits, deductions, and forms that Americans must tromp through every year, and its in Intuits best interest to make that jungle seem as thorny and inhospitable as possible. The company regularly lobbies to keep the complicated U.S. tax code in place, and opposes proposals that would radically simplify it.

So a few extra seconds of animations that make you feel like TurboTax is slaving away diligently on your returns is sure to make you feel betterbut it also keeps you in awe of what Intuits software is doing. When, at the end, it asks you to fork over 50 or 100 bucks for the effort, those few seconds might make pulling out your credit card a little easier.

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Why Some Apps Use Fake Progress Bars - The Atlantic