[nelsonenzo]

These seem like theories, not laws. And imho, some of it is very wrong, such as:

> Purposefully adding a delay to a process can actually increase its perceived value and instill a sense of trust, even when the process itself actually takes much less time.

[mattkevan]

We found adding a slight delay in between the user clicking the payment button and showing the success message in the checkout improved trust. It felt like the system was doing something important, whereas if happened instantly people worried that something had gone wrong because it was ‘too quick’.

The user is part of the system too, and sometimes giving them a bit of time to process what’s happening can be beneficial.

[galangalalgol]

It is akin to people adding weights to items to make them seem higher quality. Not in hiking gear certainly, but disassembly of held kitchen appliances or tools often turns up steel chunks used for that purpose.

[lexicality]

That one is actually genuinely true and why so many price comparison and search websites artificially load slowly with fancy loading screens.

[badsectoracula]

Reminds me when i was a kid back in the DOS days and made my own GUI system in Turbo Pascal on a 386DX machine i had. It had its own GUI library and simple applications and i had made it look kinda like Windows 95 (because i only had Win3.1 and i wanted 95 - though my take was based on screenshots i saw in magazines so it wasn't very faithful, just what i imagined to be).

The problem was, it was too fast. The shell was up and running pretty much once i pressed the enter key after typing the command in DOS. Real Windows didn't do that, so mine felt bad and fake (to me).

So i added some code in initialization to create and delete 1000 random files with some random delays between them (to cause the HDD to make "doing stuff" noises and its LED light to blink) and show a progress bar for it. After that it felt properly professional :-D.

[germinalphrase]

TurboTax also allegedly adds delays to increase the perception that the work the product does is very technical and difficult (which, of course, is not true).

[JohnFen]

It may be effective (although I'm skeptical), but is the sort of manipulative bullshit that sends me running. Sites and applications that do this are very shady sites and applications.

[carlosjobim]

I think that's more of pseudo-science. I've never heard anybody express any distrust for a service just because it's fast.

Let's say you go to a store and ask if they have a certain product. The clerk says "Sure, here it is". Is that worse than saying "Hmmm, I have to check in the warehouse first"?

[AtNightWeCode]

BS. Google have shown that any time loss in any stage of any payment process directly affect conversion rates.

[ourmandave]

Kelly Blue Book (kbb.com) pretends to take forever gathering the car price info so they can just run ads.

Strangely there's a "click here if fails to load in 10 seconds" link that lets you bypass it all immediately.

[simonbarker87]

I added a 2 second delay to a near instant process and made it feel significantly better and like “something happened”. When it was instant it felt … wrong.

[IIsi50MHz]

If I were you're user, I'd appreciate a setting to remove all such delays. That is, assuming I've little chance of convincing you to remove them permanently. (-:

[vogon_laureate]

Maybe a bit of a misnomer as the description states it's more of a "collection of best practices" that designers "can consider".

[jonny_eh]

I recall that at some point Paypal added an artifical delay for logging in with a spinner that said "securely signing you in" and it increased trust in their product, which increased usage.

Just because you find something surprising, it doesn't mean it's "very wrong".

[raincole]

Not only very correct, but far more common than you think.

[thealchemistdev]

I experienced this first hand with the manual sync button on one of my apps. I got feedback stating it didn't work when, in reality, there was no work to be done and the interface didn't have time to display 'syncing' before it finished.

The solution was to add a 50-300ms delay before the network request. Why? Because feelings and perception matter more than facts.

[_thisdot]

Perceived loading time was a matter of debate during the NextJS vs RemixJS thing. RemixJS argued for fast loading time, while NextJS argued for perceived loading time.

Remix would show a white screen and two seconds later have everything ready. Next would show the header and a loader first then gradually over the course of 3-5 seconds have everything ready.

[samsolomon]

I see a lot of comments here about added animations because the request is too fast.

In this case I would guess the issue is not with speed but feedback. The user did something, nothing changed, so they thought it was broken.

Instead of the delay you could add a toast or some text with near the button indicating that the action actually happened.

[AtNightWeCode]

Yes, it is incorrect. Some UX designs even try to make you feel like something happens instantly when it is not. Best example I can think of is that Spotify used to have this animation on the play button that was just there to hide the delay between click and play.

[pickingdinner]

Ya, sounds dark, as in dark pattern.

[rolae]

Not necessarily. Something being too fast can be confusing. If you expect a process to take some time and it ends immediately, it can feel like it failed.

I remember the people from Blogger (google) talking about this problems. People were not very familiar with blog / website builders and users were confused when their blogs got created instantly, like "This is a big deal, me getting an entire website, what happened, what went wrong? It must have aborted the process…"

[markhnthoraway]

Depends on context. There's nothing wrong with slowing down to communicate discrete steps that may happen very quickly under the hood.

- Input was received - Input was processed/stored correctly - Outcome is X

Doing everything in real time can reduce confidence and understanding. If everything takes like 5ms it feels weird, sometimes feels even like nothing happened, so people might submit again or feel the need to call and check or whatever.

It's deceptive in the sense that you are waiting maybe 500ms instead of 5ms. But it can be better UX in terms of communicating what's actually going on and having people feel comfortable with their understanding.

On the other hand, artificially slowing down something like closing an advertising modal - antipattern for sure.