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0 pointsjrochkind15y ago0 comments

It's worse. They seem to be intentionally slowing things down to make it look like the software is somehow "working harder" because to some people it justifies the high price. A progress bar that takes 5s or more to complete for an operation that actually takes under a second.

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jancsika5y ago

Hell, the standard everybody seems to have converged upon is a mendacious progress bar where the user is not told what the percentage refers to (e.g., total install time? Number of files processed? Data left to be copied?). The frontend developer could show changing Matrix glyphs instead and the widget would be functionally equivalent but without giving the user false impressions.[1]

Given that as a standard, it's difficult for me to find more outrage for Turbotax misusing this already mendacious widget.

1: Some smarty pants is going to say that at least the percentage is directional and shifting Matrix glyphs are not. Unfortunately, even that isn't true-- UIs have a long history of multiple sequential progress bars with no indication how many there are in total-- see Office Space. So progress widgets have burned through user trust long ago-- even if I've experienced Windows 10 having a single percentage counter that persists across restarts, perhaps the next update will be the time they break that pattern.

jrochkind1OP5y ago

To me there's a big difference between intentionally slowing down the underlying operation (or the ability of the UI to go to the next step anyway) so you can show a longer progress bar, and just having a poorly designed uninformative progress bar on the underlying operation.

Not to you, really? I mean, I guess we can't argue about "how outraged you are", that's up to you.

Do you think those poorly designed progress bars are built to intentionally mislead? It's possible. For what end, do you think? The TurboTax one seems designed to intentionally mislead. Even if they both are, I still prefer one that isn't making me wait artificially longer than the software actually requires though.

yeetman215y ago

People are willing to pay more for meals eaten with heavier silverware

DaiPlusPlus5y ago

I prefer cutlery that doesn’t easily fall out of my hands when eating though.

lanternfish5y ago

This sounds like it would be correct, do you know where I can find a source?

tonyedgecombe5y ago

Charles Spence at Oxford University has done a lot of work on this. It turns out just changing the colour of the plate impacts peoples perception of food.

kortilla5y ago

And slower service to boot!

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